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

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

#391

Post by xantronix »

lazide wrote: post #380
xantronix wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wisdom to understand that velocity is not equal to value; and the optimism that this will all end at some point.

That just means he’s not a middle manager or exec, not that he isn’t cashing the check from someone who is clearly a short sighted idiot.

It wasn't meant to be a literal statement, more just a reflection that the situation is so bleak that I cannot imagine a better future; anybody expressing even a little bit of it seems to me like a somebody who has not been crushed into compliance through force.

Quoting the host of the recurring Quiz Broadcast sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look: "Books mention 'hope'. What was 'hope'?"

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

#392

Post by plaguuuuuu »

xantronix wrote: post #358
murphomatic wrote: post #341

Get ready for this to become a common theme. Boardrooms are still engaged in the fever-dream promise that AI will solve all their problems, particularly those involving pesky humans. The simple lesson of "AI is another tool" will be a hard-learned one. Some industries, such as software, will take more time to mop themselves into a corner before they discover that velocity should never be a first-class concern. Speed…

You seem like a person who works at a place that doesn't have an AI mandate. That sounds nice. I miss when we had nice things in the world like that. I will never take that for granted again.

AI mandate is one of the best things that's happened to me. It's the easiest metric to game in the world.

At one point my boss asked why my AI usage was lower than other team members. I instantly knew what to do. Every session is now run at ultracode effort. My automated PR review bot averages like $80 in usage per PR review.

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

#393

Post by Incipient »

I have spent a SOLID 3 full days 8h/day (plus long running tasks overnight) thrashing out a random idea for a Web application using purely Opus (mostly Max, sometimes ultracode version). I'm not a project manager, but I genuinely tried a full 3-tier spec out - design->specs->build details.

While it was significantly better than previous attempts, it still misses very basic things - sporadically. Eg. A clear design requirement was essentially adding clients, explained clearly and comprehensively. The ability to add clients was entirely missed in the build and iteration (there were multiple 'please check its all done' separate agent runs/checks).

I can imagine in a fully autonomous deployment, in even moderate complexity, even to this day would still occasionally mess up - badly enough to cause non-trivial business issues.

I haven't managed to really figure out what's the best way, but my latest thinking is really having boil down tasks to almost unit operations "add UI button, wire to Api call. End".

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

#394

Post by tasuki »

tiew9Vii wrote: post #379
dotcoma wrote: post #346

Amongst other things, AI won’t buy cars.

The dystopian future where no one owns cars is already being laid. Cars are more and more becoming white goods appliances with the driving experience becoming less and less a priority. Even enthusiast cars now are about raw numbers and need electronics to reign them in to make useable for the average driver on the average road. The average user probably doesn’t even want to drive and have AI do it for them. Repairabi…

> The dystopian future where no one owns cars is already being laid.

Pardon me?

We're living in the dystopian present, where most everyone has a car or several. Cities are crowded with cars -- both moving and parked -- and it's awful for humans who aren't cars.

I can't wait for the moment people switch to a subscription and the cars are shared and drive themselves. The streets will be just as full of moving cars, but at least the parked cars hopefully disappear, giving us more space for trees or sidewalks or anything but cars really.

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

#395

Post by delusional »

mpyne wrote: post #375
rebuilder wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the boardroom class, employees are tools as well.

No doubt, but the issue I think they keep running into is they don't understand how useful those "human tools" are, so they keep trying to replace the functions humans provide with AI, without realizing all the other functions that the humans also provided.

Marx had a way to think about that. He would distinguish between labour as in generalized socially necessafy labour, and specific skilled labour.

Value is measure in generalized labour, since that the universal measure of human effort. The genealized amount of time a human being must spend to produce something from its parts. Generalized labour is also what's bought from labourers. You don't pay them to do something specific, you pay them to labour in general.

This contrasts against specific labour, which is whats actually required in the moment. Generalized labour power must be the right kind of specific labour to actually produce anything of value.

The AI leaders have been told that AI is labour. To the extent that it currently is, which I believe is only the case because the market hasn't adjusted, it's not the right specific labour to male anything valuable.

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

#396

Post by tudelo »

plaguuuuuu wrote: post #392
xantronix wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem like a person who works at a place that doesn't have an AI mandate. That sounds nice. I miss when we had nice things in the world like that. I will never take that for granted again.

AI mandate is one of the best things that's happened to me. It's the easiest metric to game in the world. At one point my boss asked why my AI usage was lower than other team members. I instantly knew what to do. Every session is now run at ultracode effort. My automated PR review bot averages like $80 in usage per PR review.

It is extremely easy to burn tokens if that is required. Explore this codebase. Team x wants y feature, research and generate a full plan. What does feature x in codebase y actually mean? Analyze code coverage in x. Map out code flow and find concurrency bugs in y and on and on...

Oh and my favorite: Use 5 independent subagents to review code change and summarize the findings, and for any finding determine if they are real concerns

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

#397

Post by wiether »

Retric wrote: post #378
xantronix wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wisdom to understand that velocity is not equal to value; and the optimism that this will all end at some point.

Companies ultimately don’t have a choice here. They can do what works, or they can fail. Large enough companies with enough inertia can do really dumb things for a while, but even giants fall.

I'm confused by your answer because I can't tell which way you're going.

Are you saying companies have to mandate AI everywhere?

Or are you saying the exact opposite, as your second sentence suggests?

I haven't heard of AI mandates in small companies, only in big ones.

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

#398

Post by [deleted] »

delusional wrote: post #395
mpyne wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt, but the issue I think they keep running into is they don't understand how useful those "human tools" are, so they keep trying to replace the functions humans provide with AI, without realizing all the other functions that the humans also provided.

Marx had a way to think about that. He would distinguish between labour as in generalized socially necessafy labour, and specific skilled labour. Value is measure in generalized labour, since that the universal measure of human effort. The genealized amount of time a human being must spend to produce something from its parts. Generalized labour is also what's bought from labourers. You don't pay them to do something…

[deleted]

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

#399

Post by achow »

calcifer wrote: post #387
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.

The article has named sources for its quotes, whereas your comment relies entirely on "almost certainly" which sounds a lot less informed.

OP to me sounds more authentic and seems to have inside information.

After a quick search I found a publication actually mentioning about these tools:

Ford previously told Business Insider that it had developed two bespoke AI-enhanced scanning tools that helped validate that cars were properly assembled before rolling off the lot. The tools, called AiTriz and MAIVs, both debuted in 2024. https://autos.yahoo.com/policy-and-environment/articles/ford...

And after doing cursory research on these tools, it is clear they are rudimentary (as compared to SOTA LLMs), they were essentially smartphone mounted on stands and doing visual checks using the camera - so OP could be very right.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-uses-ai-cameras-in-fact...

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

#400

Post by [deleted] »

nativeit wrote: post #377
rmason wrote: post #342

Back in the nineties Ford ran a lot of ads about how quality was job one. But in the last twenty years their quality declined by a large amount at the same time other brands were getting better. I say that as a lifelong fan of Ford, quality was why I left the brand two years ago.

Really? Ford’s quality in the last half of the 1990s was the poster child of cheap, vac-form plastics.

[deleted]
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