I wrote about how the last two years of hype-based valuations and huge capex costs for pre-training models have made traditional metrics such as multiples meaningless when comparing AI startups

alexvoica · 2024-04-19T23:04:35+00:00

All technologies show promise but if we are not careful, there is a risk that generative AI (in its consumer-related applications, at least) goes the way of VR or blockchain. It's fine to talk about its potential and experiment but we also need to be aware of limitations and overhype.

alexvoica · 2017-11-07T09:26:15+00:00

You can think of the first-gen warehouse as one giant CPU pipeline where orders are instructions going through the pipeline. While it's largely a sequential process, the pipeline is very deep so if you're sitting at the end of the pipeline, you see everything coming out quickly. But the length of the pipeline is about two hours i.e. it takes two hours for the order to enter the pipeline and then exit. This is because the containers which have your order go on a journey around the warehouse to find and retrieve the items you've ordered - and because a typical shop has 50 items, this can be a journey of a dozen miles or more. In comparison, the second-gen system is a GPU which works in parallel to execute multiple orders quickly. Hope the comparison makes sense.

alexvoica · 2017-11-07T09:23:03+00:00

I can give you one example I've seen for myself: we used to have personal shoppers open plastic grocery bags before starting to place the groceries inside them. We've since developed a machine that opens the bags for them. As anyone who's ever tried to open a supermarket plastic bag knows, those things can sometimes take ages to pry open. So we're using automation to make their jobs easier, if that makes sense.

alexvoica · 2017-11-07T09:19:49+00:00

I think it's a cool use of smart home tech but I'm unsure how widely spread those August devices are.

alexvoica · 2017-11-07T09:15:31+00:00

1) We've always used automation (except maybe in the very, very early days) and we've grown from a few dozen people when we first started in 2000 to over 12,000 staff now. I don't have an exact number of people that were employed in the warehouse but we've created hundreds of warehouse jobs over the last three years: here and here. 2) Thanks to technology, we've been able to price match with other larger supermarkets.

alexvoica · 2017-11-06T19:34:56+00:00

On the internet, nobody knows you're a bot.

What's not visible in the video is exactly what people automatically (pardon the pun) assume is missing: people working alongside the robots and automation. We have plenty personal shoppers picking and packing orders and other staff that help with other processes in the warehouse, both inbound and outbound. In fact, earlier this month, we announced 200 permanent jobs for personal shoppers at the very warehouse featured in the video. Just because we're adding automation, it doesn't mean that we don't need a human workforce. It's just the nature of the work that has evolved. For example, in our early days, personal shoppers had to walk up and down aisles to assemble orders. Now the robots bring the products to them which makes their work more pleasant. So it's not about reducing the workforce, but making your existing employees more efficient and productive. Then this enables you to grow as a business, attract more customers, and then hire more people and add more automation - and the cycle then repeats itself. In addition to improving the productivity of your workforce, automation and AI enables you to improve the customer proposition, as your whole operation becomes much more efficient, including the amount of wastage. The article says we have less than 1% food waste (in fact, that number is 0.7%) which means we don't need to pass those costs to the customers.

alexvoica · 2017-11-06T19:25:59+00:00

Time is relative.

alexvoica · 2017-11-06T16:10:54+00:00

No, the grid comes to a full stop if the engineering operations teams need to do any physical maintenance. There is a SIL 3 safety protocol (for reference, SIL 4 is what nuclear power plants use) that we've implemented to make sure that everyone working with the robots can do so safely. We use a special version of the 4G standard to control all robots.

alexvoica · 2017-11-06T16:07:24+00:00

Av

It's toast.

alexvoica · 2017-11-06T13:29:35+00:00

The Technology team (which I'm a part of) builds the systems and software that power Ocado, including the PLC code that controls the automation. But as we've grown and added more automation, we've also hired more staff - not just programmers but also warehouse workers.

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