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

alanwreath

https://archive.is/DI4Cq And the verge is covering it too: https://www.theverge.com/transportation/956316/ford-quality-...

conartist6

foot, meet gun

tossitawayplz

I would literally be homeless before I went back to a company that fired me to replace me with AI, then asked me to come back.

cryo32

Quite frankly I’m enjoying the schadenfreude on this one.

idontwantthis

I hope those engineers made Ford pay out the nose.

reactordev

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 have agents, agents of agents, and I still find myself having to carve big chunks of my project off and feed it to the dogs because it’s garbage code. (GLM-5.2)

vasac

The first attempt failed, so they caved in, but they’ll try again after a while and lay those people off again.

feverzsj

And they just go back to work like nothing happened?

stagger87

> The return of the veteran engineers at Ford cuts against the prevailing wisdom — and fear — that AI will replace all kinds of knowledge workers. But Ford found the machines couldn’t replace experience. I'm not sure this story is illustrative of that, when you have a VP of engineering saying “Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles.” He's saving face while almost certainly trying to figure out how to make the new systems work so that next time he won't need to rehire engineers.

gm678

> Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product. Clearly a lot of careful thought went into their strategy of using AI and firing engineers.

skywhopper

The folks who make the decision to throw away these engineers in the first place are the ones who should be laid off.

jayanaka98

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".

snootypoot

amazing, the same company that says people should not be allowed to repair their own vehicles. henry ford is rolling in his grave.

arjie

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 surprised. I didn’t expect Porsches to top a reliability measure. I thought they were in the “fancy but unreliable” bin. Interesting.

Sanzig

Setting aside how shortsighted it is to fire your employees to replace them with AI, Ford also screwed up by firing the wrong employees. LLMs work best in the hands of experienced senior engineers who can work at a high level of abstraction because they already understand all the pieces underneath. In a sense, using an LLM agent is like providing instructions to a very smart, very quick junior who despite being brilliant has some blind spots and lacks institutional knowledge. That's something that seniors excel at, so by firing your seniors you've fired the people best positioned to make full use of LLMs.

rvz

So "AGI" was not found internally at Ford and they didn't know they needed actual engineers to keep the lights on? It's OK to just say that the plan was to rehire back the engineers for far less compensation.

mhurron

350 of how many laid off? If 350 is a fraction of the total replaced with AI that's going to be counted as a win for AI reducing costs, they just were a little to ambitious with the initial round. That'll be counted as a learning experience because we're early in the replace people with unintelligent tools process.

K0balt

This is exactly the idiotic use case of AI coming back to bite them. The short sighted gains (and I’ll assume that they are chasing quarterlies as usual) are to be had by firing most of the junior engineers, keeping the seniors because with AI they can n* their productivity. Basically you can fire 2x junior engineers for every senior engineer you keep. But the senior engineers are the keystone here, and without juniors eventually becoming senior engineers you’ll eventually be screwed. But, that’s a problem for the -next- c-suite gang… so…

neversupervised

This just feeds a certain narrative and allows people to take exactly the wrong conclusion. Just because there’s some uncertainty at the edge, it doesn’t change where things are going.

migueldeicaza

I do wonder if the rehiring was just at a lower compensation level. "Welcome back, you are now two levels down"