Ford Rehires 'Gray Beard' Engineers After AI Falls Short (techcrunch.com) 69
Ford executives said they've hired 350 veteran engineers — some of them former employees — after AI and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality, reports TechCrunch:
Bloomberg reports the company's chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told journalists that Ford had been "relying more and more on automated quality systems" with disappointing results. So the company "brought back technical specialists," and those specialists "hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor."
Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, added, "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."
The article points out that Ford is using the rehired gray beard engineers to train younger staff — and, to reprogram its AI tools.
Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, added, "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."
The article points out that Ford is using the rehired gray beard engineers to train younger staff — and, to reprogram its AI tools.
Either this is a dupe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or Ford has no hired 700 senior engineers.
https://slashdot.org/story/26/... [slashdot.org]
Re:Either this is a dupe... (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly it is referencing the same article
Did the manager pushing the AI loose his job? (Score:3)
I'll bet he came up with yet another ploy to get his next bonus after throwing out these people on the street.
Re:Did the manager pushing the AI loose his job? (Score:4, Interesting)
My guess is it was 7 different managers in 7 different divisions that all got together one day and decided to lay off people and use 7 different AIs and none did what they wanted. Just going by my experince working with Ford. We literally called them the 7 headed monster because they couldn't get management consensus and pulled us like 5 directions at once, and also bought in on every new technology before it was vetted.
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This is signaling to the current employees that the layoffs are done, to prevent them from quitting and finding other jobs.
This indirect messaging is annoying until you compare it to the Zuck/Meta direct way of saying, "We laid off low performers" immediately hurting the job search of any former Facebook employee.
The challenge for AI? Sales. (Score:1)
The AI was an excuse for layoffs. They fired thousands of workers [cnbc.com]. This is signaling to the current employees that the layoffs are done, to prevent them from quitting and finding other jobs.
Really? Because I thought the signal to every employee was being told more in the form of the overpriced unsellable disposable dogshit made out of plastic and Greed currently rotting away on every new car lot.
AI has a problem to solve alright. How to account for the idiocy of comparing line worker pay the the CEO of the company as a basis for hostile union “negotiations” that insisted an American auto worker be paid as much as the new six-figure barbers** out there to build the kind of
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overpriced unsellable disposable dogshit made out of plastic and Greed currently rotting away on every new car lot.
Are you angry? I can't tell.
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Where it’s legal to charge 20% interest and fiscally cripple a moron who justifies budgets with girl math and TikTok trends.
"Girl math" is sexist, man.
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Women are perfectly capable of doing math.
Re: The challenge for AI? Sales. (Score:2)
That's right; they're equally capable of doing meth. Where's autocorrect when you need it
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It's about women sometimes being unable to form the math problem from general information properly.
That's not a gendered problem. It's an uneducated problem.
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Biology is sexist, woman. Grow up and deal with it.
Biology is biology. It's not sexist, although some biologists just might be sexists. They do exist across the population in most fields.
No, what is sexist is appealing incorrectly to some authority in order to justify discrimination against a particular gender. Which is what you did.
Grow up and deal with that.
Re: The challenge for AI? Sales. (Score:1)
For generations the women in the family took care of the financials of the family. They kept budgets, wrote checks and balanced the books. Females are quite capable of doing math.
I think the problem is 1) families are going the way of the dodo. 2) virtue signaling is now included as a category to be balanced on the books for egurls, and that virtue signaling is disproportionally weighted against everything else. Gotta spend a lot on clothes and travel for your instas so you can pull a whale that doesn't exi
Re: The challenge for AI? Sales. (Score:2)
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"the manager" lol you sound like you work at a gas station
Gray beard? (Score:5, Funny)
Dude I am so back. Finally a job I qualify for. Do I have to remove the crumbs and soup bits or no?
Re: Gray beard? (Score:2)
I believe it was graybeards AND silverbacks and I honestly don't know who came up with that memo. But it also mentioned getting some broads back in the office
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Quitters (Score:5, Funny)
They just didn't AI hard enough!
The real value happens when you're 7 LLMs deep with agentic whatnots! So Simple. Just needed more AI!
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keep the garlic, keeps the managers at bay
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They just didn't AI hard enough!
The real value happens when you're 7 LLMs deep with agentic whatnots! So Simple. Just needed more AI!
I sense great sarcasm but...
"...Ford is using the rehired gray beard engineers to train younger staff — and, to reprogram its AI tools."
These re-hires are going to train new engineers and the software that will replace them. Ford is very much going to be using more AI, as you say.
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That is what we've been doing for generations. Each teaches the next, and some of it gets absorbed into automation. We certainly don't make buggy whips the same way we used to.
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I think the buggy whips go under the marketing name 'ASP Electro-Baton [A,B,C]'.
Re: Quitters (Score:2)
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It's less funny when you have people literally and sincerely saying this...
I have to take some solace in the fact that these are the same idiots who talk a lot and do nothing that I usually ignore who do this all the time, but management is extra entranced with them over the AI cheerleading this go around...
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And then management will listen to you.
Not holding it right. (Score:1)
AI is very malluable. There are a lot of different ways to use it. Some ways work well, some don't, some haven't been thought of or tried yet. These sets are also changing with each new frontier advance. This is only the beginning.
The fact that a antiquated old company like Ford couldn't figure out how to use it properly yet is evidence of nothing.
Whats company age got to do with it? (Score:3)
You think smart engineers and programmers only work at week old start-ups full of pink hairs and ping pong tables? Think again mate. IBM is almost as old as Ford and is at the cutting edge in a number of spheres of research.
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The disconnect is the "promise" is that LLM brings expertise down to the masses. If AI is "too hard for Ford to get right", that dramatically undermines the messaging that drives the current expectations and levels of investment.
This is very much evidence that companies can't be as bullish as they might inclined to be, because whatever you may think of Ford, the typical company is probably worse.
Adam Becker's book (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently the nimnods at Ford bought into the crap the Sil-Val-Bros have been selling about how AI will make everything better. If you want to know what those assholes have in store for us proles, read Adam Becker's book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.
And it does not stop with Sil-Val, apparently more money than brains makes one stupid (i.e., Besos, Elmo, etc.). You might dismiss their fevered dreams (creating an AI of themselves so they can live forever, going to Mars, planting data center warts across America to suck up power and resources, etc.), but they have a lot of money and are intent on doing a lot of "restructuring" with it. Hint, us proles do not count.
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Smart People (Score:2)
apparently more money than brains makes one stupid (i.e., Besos, Elmo, etc.).
That's why you chose to stay poor, right? So you would stay so smart. You instinctively chose to stay broke, so the riches wouldn't make you stupid. Right?
Re: Smart People (Score:5, Insightful)
Being rich doesn't make you stupid, but being really rich starts to isolate you in a bubble of luxury and sycophants, and eventually you start to forget what the rest of the world is like, and start making decisions based on the unstated assumption that other people don't matter.
Charles Poon, please resign! (Score:2)
You clearly demonstrated your inability to think.
wow (Score:1)
who'd have thought ? ;-)
Sadly AI cannot see, smell or feel defects (Score:2)
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I don't think the engineers they're hiring are working on those systems either
False Hope (Score:2)
This story keeps getting reposted around the internet. It is titillating to the AI haters, as well as those in fear and denial of AI's impact on employment. It makes people feel better about a dismal future. It makes them feel needed. And it reinforces the idea that perhaps AI can't replace us.
But this is a false hope and a misleading headline. If one actually reads the story, these engineers are being hired to complete training of AI that was incomplete due to earlier departures. The positions being filled
Re: False Hope (Score:2)
There will be another few rounds of this.
Even if the greybeards manage to cobble together guidelines and fixes for AI so that it doesn't make the current crop of design errors before being laid off again, the next version of AI will not work the same way with the guidelines and fixes and will find new ways to make new errors.
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this is a false hope and a misleading headline. If one actually reads the story, these engineers are being hired to complete training of AI that was incomplete due to earlier departures
hurble durble false hope, then I shall present my own false hope!
The will never do what it is supposed to. And when it is capable of doing it then it will replace us all. We'll find out about it when the bombs drop.
Looking for silver lining here (Score:3, Funny)
Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, added, "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."
(Looks for silver lining) ... er, well, refreshingly honest, I guess?
Might as well say it (Score:3)
AI failure..more companies will be facing this ! (Score:2)
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You have 3 similar documented fixes for situation X.
Wisdom is knowing which fix to apply and why it should be used.
I suppose you can quantify each fix by frequency of use.
Sorta figures (Score:2)
Olde fartes have experience, and they got that experience over many years. As long as they keep up to date technically - and many of us do - and haven't developed early Alzheimer's, we're worth every penny we are paid. There are reasons why the elderly are revered in some cultures.
I've shown many noobs that I kno
This article is AI written (Score:2)
Think about the Irony.
History rhymes once again (Score:5, Interesting)
sounds good but the reality is⦠(Score:2)
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For less pay I bet (Score:2)
About 20 years ago I noticed the cycle.
Too big to fail private equity would collapse the economy after a bunch of right-wing politicians deregulated Wall Street and cut taxes on the wealthy.
During the economic collapse it would always be taken out on our hides. Even if you hold on to your job raises stopped or became less than inflation and the cost of your health care kep
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Repeat? (Score:1)
decision cycle (Score:2)
(slaps forehead): They should have asked AI if that was a good idea FIRST!
Next month's story: (Score:2)