Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by mothballed » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

boplicity wrote: post #257

mothballed wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society is incredibly inconsistent on this point. If a CEO shit-cans 500 people who sacrificed future career prospects for the company and end up destitute, society say's that's capitalism and they need to learn to code in a month or something. If a stay at home wife gets "bored" and divorces her husband of 20 years, he commonly owes her a decade+ of alimony to "make up for the sacrifice and time to get on her feet"…

A job doesn't usually involve a lifetime contract. And if it does, the severance required had better be incredible. Nobody should "sacrifice future career prospects" just for a job. And if they do, it's hard to blame the employer on this, especially considering the premise implies they had choice in the matter.

I'm not sure how on earth you could consider marriage a lifetime contract when it's no-fault divorce at any second. The divorce process is at-will, though it takes some time to finalize.

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

#262

Post by mukbangpervert » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #174

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…

Consequences for American car executives, are you crazy? Have you seen Stellantis cars recently? Large parts of the US (and European most likely) car industry is driving straight into irrelevance

Stellantis is wild. They went from having a large portfolio of brands, each of which had many popular vehicles in America to having the Chrysler minivan, the Dodge charger, the Jeep Wrangler/Gladiator, and the Ram pickup.

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

#263

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

tandr wrote: post #223

helterskelter wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the topic of Stellantis, I rented one recently (through no fault of my own) and when I returned it the guy asked me how it was. I told him I wouldn't drive one of those things again if they paid me, and the guy said "yeah we get that a lot, let me get you the discount". It sounded like they had a "Stellantis discount" for people who said something. Nice guy, actually.

As far as I can see on Wikipedia page or homepage for Stellantis, they do not make cars under their own name. So, which brand did you rent actually?

[deleted]

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

#264

Post by dang » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #136

Ford has hired 350 engineers over the last 3 years which happened alongside short comings in using AI inspection tooling. This has nothing to do with LLMs and instead is almost certainly about their MAIVIS and AiTriz pilots, which use old school CNNs on custom IBM hardware to do visual inspections.

Submitted title was "Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors", which is not what the article says.

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(We've reverted to the article's title now)

p.s. Article titles are sometimes rotated by the publications, in which case the submitter usually followed the guidelines but it takes time for us to catch up.

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

#265

Post by graemep » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

exabrial wrote: post #94

For those of us who lived through the "Offshoring" Craze of the mid-2000s, this has the exact same arc. Corp CEOs / CFOs golf buddies coouldn't stop yapping about how much they saved paying people less by offshoring. So step 1, they fire a bunch of people and send work overseas, driving up their financial metrics for 5-6 quarters until their staff and their organization finally break at stage 2. Turns out cultural an…

The solution is clearly to use an AI to communicate across cultural barriers. It can do translation too so your offshore workforce does not even need to speak your language which will cut costs even more. /s

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

#266

Post by dominotw » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

Tade0 wrote: post #41

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".

A friend of mine prepared an arsenal of hooks and the like to address this and LLMs still disobey them at times. I don't have high hopes that there exists a bulletproof solution to this.

solution is to always do what it has seen in training data and how it was RL. But ai companies dont tell you that. so you have to reverse engineer its training and stick to to that.

These are no general purpose machines. They are shipping a subset mindset not general intelligence like they want us to belive .

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

#267

Post by drob518 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

boredatoms wrote: post #185

thewebguyd wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the right thing. How were we to know that it wouldn’t work?” And why does the board/shareholders allow a CEO to continue into their position by just following everyone else? I'm sure things are different at massive scales, but I run my own side business (photography). I watch the local market, and I have the attitude of "Whatever everyone else is d…

Boards are usually filled with ex-CEOs who also thought these dumb bets were good

And the board is pulling down $300k per year or more for sitting in maybe 11 meetings per year and participating in a “comp committee” where they just review data and recommendations from comp consultants and agree to whatever the consultants tell them. So, why rock the boat?

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

#268

Post by thewebguyd » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #222

ryandrake wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Line must go up, forever." These guys have squeezed out every cost and slack from their system. They've found the exact revenue-maximizing prices and segmentation for their products. They've cut quality to the point where customers will just barely not reject their product. They have used every legal and accounting trick at their disposal to keep that line going up. But, next quarter, line must still go up! The fina…

> Line must go up! This is how they'll do it for a few more quarters. This is why the messaging is so unified across the industry, across every C-suite out there. They all need to believe. The real danger for the economy is when the runway finally runs out. And I believe we are at a perfect-storm scenario... AI is obviously a giant wash-trading bubble that alone would be sufficient to trigger a repeat of the 2007ff c…

And that's how you get a new war. Line must go up isn't only for the corps, its for US GOV debt too. Interest payments are already close to $1 trillion. As soon as GDP growth doesn't stay ahead of the compounding interest, the music stops. The line must go up or you get a sovereign deb crisis. When all other avenues are expended, the gov must force the economy to expand by any means necessary. Historically, that meant war.

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

#269

Post by civet_java » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

pojzon wrote: post #184

Avicebron wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sentiment feels like a relic of a previous age. Yes _maybe_ but it's also equally likely that the best they laid off was on the ropes for months trying to battle ghost job spam and AI filters. It's almost shaming anyone who isn't hired someone immediately as deficient and "not the best". Honestly the conversation should be focused on how the execs can he made responsible.

Im not calling for any action, but that kid doing something about Healthcare CEO - that did help.

I am quite sympathetic to your position. Seeing those who manage to evade accountability consistently paying a heavy personal price was immensely satisfying. But at the same time, I don't think it resulted in any structural changes that minimise the proportion of accountability-evaders plauging society.

Ideally of course everyone, irrespective of any immutable traits they may have, gets to enjoy a healthy, satisfying, and stable life with plently of avenues for upward mobility. Short of that ideal, a society which equally burdens the rich and poor with devastating, seemingly random, unavoidable life-chaning events is decidedly better than one which only affects the poor.

So for these reasons I don't advocate for the actions of "the kid" but I don't think the consequences of his actions were in any way "bad" per se.

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

#270

Post by drob518 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

ffsm8 wrote: post #204

thewebguyd wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We did it because everyone else is doing it and we were told it was the right thing. How were we to know that it wouldn’t work?” And why does the board/shareholders allow a CEO to continue into their position by just following everyone else? I'm sure things are different at massive scales, but I run my own side business (photography). I watch the local market, and I have the attitude of "Whatever everyone else is d…

> You don't become a pioneer in your industry by just cargo culting everyone else. You usually don't become a CEO of a long established company by being a pioneer either though... You may be able to argue this particular case though, as he is a marketing guy and he was a pioneer in marketing as few others capitalized on social media/YouTube when he did. But I feel like that's completely unrelated to how adjacent that…

Sometimes you do get the CEO gig for being a pioneer, but then the whole organization thwarts whatever you want to do by repeatedly saying “we don’t do it that way here” and dragging their feet until you get fired.