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

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

alanwreath

Comments (280)

  • exabrial
    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 and communication barriers are things we haven't really figured out how to communicate across efficiently, and that only a handful of people are truly rockstars at it; others just aren't cut out for it. Stage 3 anyone that is competent to get another job already left, leaving a smoldering shell of company that dies by attrition at stage 5.
  • 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.
  • SwtCyber
    Funny how almost every wave of automation starts the same way: "we're gonna cut headcount," but ends with "we're just shifting roles"AI is pretty good at scaling existing knowledge, but if the actual knowledge is just in the head of an engineer who can hear that a press is acting up, the model doesn't really have much to go on
  • alanwreath
  • 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)
  • WarmWash
    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.
  • 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".
  • freeopinion
    I have a simple mind. I think of a company with 100 employees building a dozen houses at a time. That company could replace a six-person framing crew with a two-person, one-robot team as an experiment. They could do various experiments to see if there was a better option here. It would be at the expense of four employees.A company with 1000 employees that builds 100 houses at a time might cut a dozen employees to create three robot crews. A 10,000-employee company that builds 1000 houses at a time would still only need to experiment with a handful of crews, affecting only 20-30 or so employees.I marvel that a company has let themselves grow so out of touch with their business that they can't understand the impact of changes without carnage at this scale.
  • breakpointalpha
    US software engineers need a union.If I hadn't already landed a job somewhere else, I would only return with a 20% pay bump and an iron-clad contract.
  • vasac
    The first attempt failed, so they caved in, but they’ll try again after a while and lay those people off again.
  • 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.
  • jmartrican
  • moomin
    I feel like "Company ditches staff in favour of AI" stories currently fit into two categories 1) The CEO is actually ditching staff for other reasons like falling revenue, but "going AI first" sounds a lot better 2) The CEO is making a mistake.
  • jhack
    This is going to happen more and more. AI is a tool that should make your employees more efficient not replace them outright. And if it doesn't make your employees better? I guess AI isn't applicable to your business then.I can see a lot of companies coming to this realization over the coming months and years.
  • meerita
    This is excellent news. I'm glad some executives are starting to understand that AI will never replace an engineer with knowledge. AI is just a tool that needs guidance. If they put people without knowledge in charge of the machine gun, they will never be able to hit any target. Junior and mid-level engineers will never become super engineers by telling AI, "Just do this."
  • small_model
    AI is a great revolutionary tool for work, but it is still a tool and needs humans to drive it. Obviously companies heard the promise of "Replace your large headcount expense with cheap tokens" and creamed their pants. Its funny to see them walk back, it will be at least a few years if not more before it replaces humans fully (and will need another breakthrough)
  • namuol
    Over-hiring during the bygone era of free money is now seeing an overcorrection. AI is a true if small part of it, but mainly it’s an excuse that doubles as posturing to the investor hive-mind.
  • I_dream_of_Geni
    Oh grand! And I bet that these rehires are going to be FULLY emotionally invested and fully loyal for the future. just stupid all the way around...
  • niko323
    Yeah, but they are short-term re-hires. Once they "get encoded" it will be bye Felica: "Ford just wants to first seasoned engineers walked out before their decades of knowledge could be encoded into automated workflows." https://www.gadgetreview.com/ford-fired-its-best-engineers-l...
  • random3
    (shooting from the hip) What if the 350 engineers had built a company instead? Union-like efforts could focus on creating new companies (having the "union" is about ensuring a certain level of organizational knowledge, like YCombinator creates a structure around startups)I think companies would more careful about how fast and lose they operate, if firing may mean having to contract with a 3rd party.
  • GL26
    Problem with thinking you can replace your employees with AI, this is not the case. This is like thinking you could replace your NASA engineers with IBM computers in the 60s. The AI revolution changes drastically the way people work, and empower them, they multiply their productivity, but they never ever replace domain expertise, and business logic.
  • khriss
    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 playing with people's lives via layoffs, since it's the 'in' thing to do. The incentives are huge on the upside and zero on the downside for them.
  • draginol
    This is what we are finding a lot with the "AI normies". Because the AI responses are so confident new users of it think it must be correct.AI is confidently wrong a lot. And so you can imagine a lot of execs thinking the AI can do a lot more than it really can.
  • anon
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  • migueldeicaza
    I do wonder if the rehiring was just at a lower compensation level."Welcome back, you are now two levels down"
  • mathattack
    Interesting as companies like Ford like to show they’re on the leading edge of AI, but do they really have the capabilities and 10x engineers?
  • dolphinscorpion
    They will try it again next year, after they slap an AI camera on the rehired people.
  • csours
    I've lost my ability to believe that things will feel 'normal' at work.I no longer want to make connection with any coworkers.
  • motbus3
    They should charge at least 30% more because now they know that they can't keep production going
  • 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.
  • snootypoot
    amazing, the same company that says people should not be allowed to repair their own vehicles. henry ford is rolling in his grave.
  • skywhopper
    The folks who make the decision to throw away these engineers in the first place are the ones who should be laid off.
  • idontwantthis
    I hope those engineers made Ford pay out the nose.
  • gorbachev
    So...don't buy any Ford vehicles designed and/or manufactured in the last 8 months or so?
  • flowerthoughts
    I wonder which of the management consulting companies caused this fire/rehire experiment.
  • nova22033
    Were these engineers fired and replaced with AI? Article implies they brought back retired engineers.
  • wartywhoa23
    I hope those engineers demanded 2x higher salaries this time.
  • 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...
  • 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…
  • xyproto
    Oh how the wheels have turned.
  • catlifeonmars
    What does it mean to “train the AI”?
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • vvpan
    Do we have any hard data about AI improving any business metrics yet? I am not skeptical that it might, but I have yet to see anything.
  • willmadden
    Whoopsie, quick, let's boost our quarterly bonus by 50% for being bold and experimental.
  • simonw
    This HN headline is editorialized, the Bloomberg headline is "Ford AI Hiccups Push Carmaker to Rehire ‘Gray Beard’ Inspectors".The editorialized headline is also misleading: "Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors" - there is nothing in the original story that suggests Ford were expecting AI to "train juniors".And since the Bloomberg headline is behind a paywall the editorialized headline is most of what we have to go on.This Verge story would be a better link: "Ford had to hire back former engineers to fix mistakes made by its automated systems" https://www.theverge.com/transportation/956316/ford-quality-...And the crucial detail: nothing indicates Ford laid off the 350 people who were re-hired. It looks to me like it could be bringing back people who retired.
  • anon
    undefined
  • conartist6
    foot, meet gun
  • tamimio
    > Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train itI would rephrase it as it’s only as good as you know what you are doing. Even if the trained input is good, keeping it to scope and making sure it delivers without workarounds requires a human brain who have the past experience.
  • Noaidi
    If AI thinks so much faster than humans. does it age fater than humans? and in that case, does AI have dementia already?
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • justonepost2
    All the people happy about this are just holding back the progress of our species smh.won’t someone think of the lightcone!
  • anon
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  • qsxfthnkp2322
    Management at these USA companies could give zero fucks about you.It’s a disease that has spread throughout all of capitalism.But that’s USA 250 years.
  • aberrahmane_b
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  • maxothex
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  • T-8805-5
    [dead]
  • alanwreath
    [flagged]
  • cryo32
    Quite frankly I’m enjoying the schadenfreude on this one.