Amazon builds AI model to optimize packaging

This...actually seems like a good use of AI? I generally think AI is being shoehorned into a lot of use cases where it doesn't belong but this seems like a proper place to use it. It's serving a specific and defined purpose rather than trying to handle unfiltered customer input or do overly generic tasks,

Yeah, it is one of the least bad uses for it.

But then again, using literal tera-watts-hours of compute power to save on the easiest actually recyclable material known to man (cardboard), maybe that's just me, maybe I'm too jaded, but it sounds like a pretty bad overall outcome.

It isn't a bad deal for Amazon, tho, who is likely to save on costs, that way, since energy is still orders of magnitude cheaper than it should be[^1], and cardboard is getting pricier.

[^1]: if we were to account for the available supply, the demand, and the future (think sooner than later) need for transition towards new energy sources... Some that simply do not have the same potential.
- I think you're overstating the compute power and understating the amount of cardboard Amazon uses
- They may also save costs on trucking. Smaller boxes => less full truck.
- I wonder what would be the benefit of using AI over writing a script that calculates these things.
Eh, I doubt that. Bin packing is a very well-researched problem. It's one of those nasty NP ones but we already have very good algorithms giving very good approximations in very short amounts of time the chance that throwing machine learning at the problem helps is not zero, but close to it. What that kind of approach certainly won't get you is guarantees, those approximation algorithms can be configured to spit out solutions that are at most 1% or whatever you want worse than the optimal solution.

I doubt this actually has anything to do with Amazon's logistics operations it's just their marketing team wanting to hype up Amazon for AI.

AI

Always Indian

Note that "optimizing" Amazon package can't possibly be a very high bar to clear. Just being smart enough to package multiple items coming from the same distribution center on the same delivery route into the same box would do it... Something that other online retailers figured out decades ago but apparently somehow Amazon still hasn't.

Used to work at an Amazon warehouse, things are a lot more complex then you seem to realize.
- Care to expound? Can you explain why a small bottle of vitamins will sometimes come in a box 8 times it's size. Filled with air bubble packing? I've always got the sense that box size was not at all a priority for them.
Bruh did you read the article at all? Nothing you talked about has anything to do with what this AI is for.
- Yes, I did. And what it talks about actually ignores my complaint, which is why I file their claim about "avoid more than 2 millions tons of packaging material worldwide" in the bogus column.
  
  Their system obviously does not take into account multi-item orders at all, and seems to operate purely on a one-product, one-package model. Which is stupid. They're not trying to avoid landfill waste, they're trying to minimize returns due to breakages but without putting any human intervention into the process.
In my experience, every item from the same warehouse comes packaged together. Are you sure the items are sourced from the same warehouse, because they aren't going to unpack them and pack them together again when they reach the final distribution location. Perhaps it becomes super inefficient to pack items together in super large warehouses, where the items are sourced far apart from each other?

Just use whatever Temu uses.

Temu packagers could fit a whole factory in the boxes Amazon uses to ship my deodorant

This seems like it has pretty powerful potential for space flight.

Being able to aggressively min max packaging materials to secure materials could be critical for reducing payload sizes on shuttles, where every single individual gram counts.

Each kg of packaging is thousands of dollars to get into orbit, so that's really appealing.

I'd be curious to see if Amazon is also working on box packing algorithms for maximizing fitting n parcels across x delivery trucks.

IE if you have 10,00 boxes to move, what's the fewest delivery trucks you can fit those boxes into as fast as possible too, which introduces multiple complex concepts. Both packing to maximize space usage and the order you pack it in to minimize armature travel time...

I'd put money down amazon is perfecting this algorithm right now, and has been for awhile.

This is already worked in through mathematics, it is its own mathematical field. We can optimize packaging through formulas that are very fast and accurate. No need to train a AI for that. Especially not for space flight, AI are prone to hallucinations that is not something you want anywhere near any space mission that requires precision and predictability. I believe Johannes Kepler started this field in the 1600s, it is not something new. It is definitely a complex problem, but not new and not unheard of. Amazon is not exactly inventing something new and amazing here..
- AI is not prone to hallucinations, LLMs are. I doubt Amazon is building a chatbot to optimise packaging.
Amazon probably does have some programmatic way of determining how much to fit in a truck, but that's not what this is. Instead, it's them trying to cheap out on packaging materials in the dumbest way possible, by figuring out what the reasonably acceptable minimum threshold is for packaging durability but not taking into account size or packing multiples of items at all (as far as I can tell).

This is a pure cost cutting measure on their part. Anything else is just a tangential side benefit.

Trolley/Bin packing is a solved problem and NP-complete, this is yet another totally pointless use of AI.

It's literally a module in the first year of any computer science programme.

Just fitting objects into the smallest box isn't everything according to the article. This is trying to identify fragile objects and recommend appropriate protective packaging where required to minimize the risk of damage in shipping. If you use a conventional packing algorithm to pack dishes and vases into the smallest box you will receive a box of glass shards on your doorstep. Is AI the best solution? I'm not sure, but using actual statistics of damaged goods and their means of packaging sounds like a worthwhile consideration.
- How to properly wrap fragile objects, etc, is again a solved problem.
  
  Best case scenario this is PR nonsense.
Isn’t that the point though? We think it can’t get any better, let’s let something else confirm it.

lol, can't wait for my Klein bottle shaped package

So this is good to reduce packaging waste and probably fitting more packages on trucks/planes, reducing emissions I am guessing. But how much power does running it cost and how is the power being generated? Is it a net loss for their global emission, or is it just making Amazon save money? I'm still pretty dumb at this stuff

Whew, why not let human do this ?