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Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

bloomberg.com

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Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#61

Post by nosioptar »

SoftTalker wrote: post #42
nosioptar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a couple of Taurusii back in the day. 100% ended up having a problem where the power steering pump shit the bed because a plastic piece in the pressurized side failed. Paid to repair one, oem pump broke on drive home due to same plastic piece under pressure. My point being, Ford's had shit for brains for decades. Its a fucking wonder any of their vehicles make it out of the parking lot.

I had a Focus in the 2000's that was the most reliable car I ever owned. Rust got it eventually but it still started instantly at any temperature and ran like a new car.

If I had a nickel for every broken focus door handle I've fixed... (There's a weak pin that always breaks.)

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#63

Post by cyanydeez »

khriss wrote: post #57

Interestingly, there were no consequences for the execs that made this 'mistake'. There seems to be almost unlimited cover for execs cargo culting on using AI as a pretext for layoffs. If it doesn't implode almost immediately, they get massive bonuses, if it blows up in their face, oh well they had the courage to 'take a bold strategic decision' In other words, they don't really have a plan, but they are happy playin…

corporatism is on equal footing with prosperity gospel.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#64

Post by prescriptivist »

Sorry but this reeks of marketing. To what extent was Ford actually attempting to replace these engineers with AI tools in the last three years or were they just letting them go by attrition? Was this the result of an actual AI influenced layoff? I read both the Verge and the Bloomberg piece and none of this seems to be articulated but it sure does seem to capture a vibe right now that companies are footgunning themselves all over the place with LLMs, despite no evidence of this being related to any of that...

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#65

Post by bigstrat2003 »

contravariant wrote: post #60
jayanaka98 wrote: post #23

The reason AI fails in Industry is that SKILL.md or other knowledge-injection methods do not guarantee compliance. AI just thinks it "knows better".

If compliance was the main issue we wouldn't have had to invent ways for computers to do something other than exactly what they were asked.

We didn't have to do that. It is, in fact, extremely stupid that we have done that. Computers are valuable because they are fast and deterministic. Fast but stochastic has no value.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#66

Post by KronisLV »

K0balt wrote: post #52
reactordev wrote: post #10

This is going to be the norm across the board as the models have failed to live up to the hype. I do think LLMs and agents and all are great at helping you through tough problems but we aren’t there yet on getting them to do all the work while we just architect and design. Again, it’s close, and for your use cases you might be there already but for low level and big corporate lift and shifts, it’s not there yet. I ha…

Documentation driven development is your friend here. 75% of my workflow is generating documentation, at ever lower levels of abstraction, until it’s just code. The code usually comes out optimal, clean, and bug free (after passing tests) and. Suuuuuper well documented lol. It’s human in the loop over and over again tho

> 75% of my workflow is generating documentation, at ever lower levels of abstraction, until it’s just code

Some might hate that writing code (which they enjoy) is turning into that, others might doubt the efficacy of doing that and the claims about it working so well.

Personally, I’d say that docs help as long as they’re meaningful and not too long (even AI tools have limited context), but you probably also want to codify what you can into code.

For example I wrote a tool in Go and goja called ProjectLint (not public yet but anyone can do that in a week) where you write custom rules in regular ECMAScript that can check whatever you want - code conventions across languages, project structure and architecture and all the stuff that goes under “In this project, we do X but don’t do Y” that just telling an LLM about (or colleagues) will be worth nothing (even memories and focus are limited), instead CI gates that.

I guess I reinvented a simplified and stack-agnostic version of ArchUnit but whatever, it works for me and I can use the same tool in Python and Java projects and elsewhere as well as parallelize all the read only checks and run sequentially the potential-write ones that might auto-fix stuff.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#67

Post by foxyv »

There are two kinds of knowledge. There is explicit knowledge which can be codified easily in markdown files or a wiki. Then there is tacit knowledge which is mostly encoded in the experience of an organization's individuals. Explicit knowledge is like the tip of a giant institutional knowledge iceberg.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#68

Post by brianmckenzie »

arjie wrote: post #26

How interesting. So a Ford car is now more reliable than a Toyota soon after purchase but Toyota didn’t fire anyone and Ford fired, implemented automated reviews, and rehired. So their process didn’t bring them back to neutral. It placed them above the traditionally reliable manufacturers. So maybe the key is firing everyone and then rehiring the good guys after you implement automated systems. Though I’m somewhat su…

I've had two different Porsches, a Cayman S and a Macan. Neither gave me a day of trouble. You just have to do all the maintenance, which is obviously expensive.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#69

Post by josefritzishere »

The impression I'm getting over this huge number of AI roll backs is that AI is useful in some circumstances, but it's just not a cure-all. It is expensive, and increasingly so, straining the ROI scenario. My expectation is that the use-case for successful AI implementations is ultimately going to be narrow.

Re: Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors

#70

Post by yifanl »

khriss wrote: post #57

Interestingly, there were no consequences for the execs that made this 'mistake'. There seems to be almost unlimited cover for execs cargo culting on using AI as a pretext for layoffs. If it doesn't implode almost immediately, they get massive bonuses, if it blows up in their face, oh well they had the courage to 'take a bold strategic decision' In other words, they don't really have a plan, but they are happy playin…

If they gave the engineers appropriate severance packages, then they're at least out that much as a stupidity tax, but that's probably the most we can expect as far as consequences for the exec suite.
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