Mind you, that isn’t the number of companies or retail chains licensing the tech; that’s the total number of locations. Nor is that the tally in one state or even one country. In four countries combined — with a total population of about 465 million — Just Walk Out is being used in “more than 140 third-party locations.”

On average, that means there’s one third-party Just Walk Out store for every 3.3 million people in those four countries. (They must be busy!) By contrast, there are over one million retail locations in the US, and, as of 2019, Starbucks had 241 locations in New York City alone, and there are over one million

Amazon had reportedly already planned to remove Just Walk Out tech from its Fresh grocery stores for roughly a year because it was too expensive and complicated for larger retail spaces to run and maintain. The company now pitches its tech as ideal for smaller convenience stores with fewer customers and products — like its own Amazon Go stores, which it has been busy shutting down over the last couple of years.

The company reportedly gutted the team of developers working on Just Walk Out tech earlier this month. (You get one guess as to how the laid-off workers were instructed to leave the office.) As part of recent layoffs from Amazon’s AWS unit and Physical Stores Team, the company allegedly left only “a skeleton crew” to work on the tech moving forward. A skeleton crew to maintain a skeleton sounds about right.

In fairness, some of those locations are at high-traffic venues. That includes nine merch stores at Seattle’s Lumen Field (home to the Seahawks and Sounders), near Amazon’s headquarters. Delaware North, a large hospitality and entertainment company, has opened “more than a dozen” stores using the tech. Amazon says stores adopting Just Walk Out have reported increased transactions, sales and customer satisfaction.

Despite the reported gutting of Just Walk Out’s development team, Amazon says it “continues to invent the next generation of this technology to improve the checkout experience for large-format stores.” Its next steps include improving latency for “faster and more reliable receipts,” new algorithms to recognize customer actions and new sensors better.

If the reports about layoffs are accurate, the handful of remaining Just Walk Out developers will have their work cut out for them.

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The company, which added a “head” and “hands” to Digit earlier this year, pitches the demonstration as a glimpse into how large language models (LLMs) can enhance its humanoid machines. It suggests it’s a natural fit, describing Digit as “a physical embodiment of artificial intelligence.”

“We created a demo space with a series of numbered towers of several heights, as well as three boxes with multiple defining characteristics,” Pras Velagapudi, Agility Robotics’ vice president of innovation and chief architect, explained in the clip. “Digit was given information about this environment, but was not given any specific information about its tasks. Just natural language commands of varying complexity to see if it could execute them.”

The clip shows Digit’s beat-by-beat inner monologue overlaid on the screen as the robot thinks its way through the task. For example, “I should find out what commands I can use,” “I should first assess the environment to see what items and locations are available,” and “Darth Vader’s light saber is red, and so the red box (box2) is the one I need to move. The tallest tower in the front row is tower4. I will first move to the location of box2.”

After moving to the location of the red box, Digit continues. “Now that I’m at the location of box2, I should pick it up,” it reasons. It continues, “Now that I have box2, I should move to the location of the tallest tower in the front row, which is tower4” and “Now that I’m at tower4, I should place box2 on it.” Finally, it declares its work finished: “I believe I have completed the task, as I have moved the box that is the color of Darth Vader’s light saber (red, box2) to the tallest tower in the front row (tower4).”

Agility Robotics, which pitches Digit as sparing human workers from the most taxing physical activities, says it created the demo to “show how LLMs could make our robots more versatile and faster to deploy.” The company is building an Oregon factory to produce 10,000 humanoid robots annually. It has also inked a deal with Amazon for the retailer to test Digit in a Seattle-area facility. Fiction-fueled fears aside, the robots are much more likely to hurt humans by stealing their warehouse jobs than by shapeshifting, murdering innocents or reenacting other Hollywood-fueled dystopian nightmares.

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