“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” said Charles Poon, VP of vehicle hardware engineering, in a briefing this week with reporters.
Wow thought ford was better than that. Sad
yeah they’ve really fallen off since the days of Nazism
And they’re going to fire Charles Poon for fucking this up, right?
Mr.Poon is known for fucking things…
I hope they had to double their previous salaries…
VP should be fired.
Very normal story at this point. Managers incompetently think AI will magically replace employees, they lay off employees, it doesn’t work, they rehire the employees.
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Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product
That’s so low IQ, like saying “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing a lawn mower and adjust the landscaping requirements, that that would produce a high quality lawn.”
Exactly, it’s incompetent managers making stupid decisions in the hope of looking good by reducing headcount. People see this and think aha, one more reason to hate AI, but blaming AI is like blaming a fork for not being a spoon.
Hopefully those employees said, “Sure, I’ll come back, but my salary requirement is 50% more than you were paying me.”
It would be great if all the workers would agree on this collectively, rather than just one offs.
I always thought it was a joke until it happened to friends of mine. Massive layoffs, they were experts in one specific technology, they came back as consultants for a few years with a doubled salary. They were fired again later, but with a lot more money so it was worth it.
In the current job market, you know it was the other way round.
If the company proactively reaches back out to you, you have the upper hand, regardless of the general hiring atmosphere. It indicates that they don’t want to take the time for someone else to ramp up on institutional knowledge they know you already possess.
I hope they negotiated their new salary very strongly
So they fired the executives responsible, right?
Executives make some major mistakes but never seem to be held accountable.
Lol. Probably got bonuses then celebrated for identifying the issue and fixing it.
Heh, a few weeks back a new project manager at my work held a meeting about an upcoming project, and half the team was able to say the timeline was workable, but the specifics the project manager laid out would lead to disaster, and we just had to adjust the strategy, but still have same time and same cost. We spelled out exactly what would go wrong and how, based on previous attempts to do it the way he said. It was scheduled to be a weeklong project, which would have been a fine timeline.
He got stubborn, insisted that based on his research his approach was right, and while he would have us on standby in the unlikely event of a problem, he would largely outsource the project to a company that agreed with his plan.
So the project started Monday, and based on past experience we expected to be called into action on Tuesday morning and have to hustle, or maybe Tuesday end of day and really get overworked to close it in time. So Friday comes along and we are shocked that it must be going ok since we hadn’t heard anything. 4pm rolls around, the project manager calls us in a panic saying it’s all gone nowhere, zero progress made, and he has escalated to make sure we take over and now we had to make the Monday morning deadline, or our asses are screwed. Everyone worked their asses off, a couple didn’t sleep the whole weekend.
So in a followup call, the project manager said “no one could have predicted it would go so badly”, and then an email came out from executive team congratulating the project manager for making the project work despite challenging circumstances.
That would make me quit on the spot. No notice. No explanation. Just get up and leave and not say any word to anyone.
No matter what, the parasites in the big club always fail upwards.
*Underpaying someone else to fix it.
Can we start replacing executives with AI? Big money savings there, and you don’t even need a particularly good model
Could probably get the job done with a half-decent flowchart, really.
All CEOs do is mindlessly follow trends; perfect use case for AI.
I’d settle for regular old I
Probably invested more in AI.
I’ve been using an LLM for programming for last 6mo and it needs constant babysitting. It’s basically something that just does the most straightforward thing without consideration of nuance, maintainability or whether to actually split into a module. This is very much not surprising.
The active dev I know who uses it daily says it drastically reduces the time he spends on routine tasks and sometimes comes up with novel approaches, but he definitely has to check everything. The problem is inexperienced or non-experienced people thinking it’s a magic lamp you can rub and it poofs out an expert programmer.
It’s obnoxious enough to try to use for myself, sometimes useful but obnoxious to review the code and just constant screwups except for exceedingly boilerplate stuff or stuff that can take some sloppiness (e.g. LLM can make it easy to indicate some variables to get from argv and do the tedium of that plus help text plus man page edits and generally do that fine). Even if it doesn’t screw up obviously, if the code is verbose, I know a screw up is lurking and just ditch it and do it myself.
However, the real pain comes in as other people use it. Just today someone had an issue and normally they’d ask a developer for help and offer debug appropriate information and/or access. However, they “just had Claude do it, even used Opus 4.8 to make sure it’s good” and it generated a very verbose report on the issue, why it went wrong, and the appropriate change to make it work. Very detailed and the explanation sounded quite reasonable. Problem was that it was horribly and absolutely wrong, a fiction of a rationalization over a bad code change. It made a change that happened to appear to work for him, but in reality it replaced a failure due to unrecognized data to silent corruption of the data in a facet the user specifically did not care about. Claude claimed it was correctly mapping the unrecognized data correctly, but it just made up a completely untethered conversion based on nothing. Now I could tell the explanation and code change was bullshit at a glance, but it became an argument because the user wouldn’t give me actionable debug details because “he already had Claude fix it”. I had to keep trying to find holes in the Claude rationalization that the user would also recognize, and he sided with Claude four times until the fifth problem in Claude’s explanation finally stuck (it asserted that the problem was due to running a specific outdated version of a specific software, problem being that specific version never even existed, and the minimum “good” version was 10 years old and the version the user was running was about a month old).
I don’t understand how people get this far and still don’t understand that AI is much better at sounding plausible than being correct.
It’s a bottom-dollar offshore team that can type faster. It depends on the situation whether that’s something that’s worth the time and effort to manage.
Yeah, I use it for some programming tasks as well. I’m sick and tired of telling it that it did something wrong or simply omitted something, only to have it apologize and offer to fix its own mistakes.
You should be glad it’s apologizing. On the occasions I’ve used it to try to actually write code for me it’s had a tendency to blame me for its mistakes.
It writes a function that gets stuck in an infinitely recursive loop that never exits, I point it out and it’s all “Aha! You’ve fallen for a classic recursion trap!” What do you mean I’ve fallen for it?
Between those experiences and seeing the hot garbage some of my coworkers vibe coded, it was enough for me to relegate LLMs purely to the “ask questions that you would have searched for on StackOverflow” role. And it frustrates me that search was made so impotent that it’s not a real option to avoid the LLM entirely. The multiple answers and perspectives on SO were often really valuable.
The major problem is that the work of an LLM has a massive number of hidden ‘assumptions’ that you need to be aware of. If you don’t already have a good working knowledge of the task you wont have an intuition about those assumptions. It’s annoying.
Yeah, and for those who don’t know, the rationalization output of the LLM is just so pursuasive. It sounds quietly confident and rattles off things that sound like real details.
People are believing the LLM output over actual human experts and the human experts have to expend non-trivial effort trying to disprove an LLM output before they can get on with the business of doing it right.
Yeah, like cards being the best thing ever on front-end. If I want a basic layout I put “avoid cards” usually because then it’ll use them sparingly. But yeah, it’s just autocomplete so it’s always going to get the lowest common denominator code based on what it decided to look at.
I’m now looking into finding something faster than GPT/Claude where I can ping pong prompt faster and get what I want. Whatever it writes first is just a first draft anyway.
That’s such a dumb fucking quote. Imagine being a stockholder and reading that sentence spouted from someone at the helm of the company.
Kick rocks, wet socks.
Your thinking like a logical person…not a sycophant with an entitled attitude to their gains.
Jim Farley says a lot of stupid shit to the press.
Seems like we’re entering the “find out” phase…
If only…
Firing a large group of people and re-hiring a subset at reduced rates is a standard business practice used to keep wages down. This wasn’t a mistake in policy, it was a clumsy execution.
Or perhaps a little bit of both: an inelegant way to handle a mistake.
AI is a tool not an employee.
