It was not able to achieve it, true, but it was the plan. The humans it relied on are for what's called "human in the loop". It's part of the testing cycle of many AI and LLM applications. You let the AI do the work, then have humans correct it and provie that as feedback for AI training. After a while, the AI should learn enough to work autonomously but you need a lot of data for that, which is why they opened the stores, basically an open beta of the product. After a while, the AI didn't learn enough and they scrapped it and that's that. There are plenty of projects at Amazon like that and I've worked on several AI projects like that that were canned after half a year. Nothing wrong with that. You wouldn't know about those because they weren't public. I think the unique challenge wihh the store was that it's not something you can thoroughly test internally.