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- Hacker News
- 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".by jayanaka98
- If compliance was the main issue we wouldn't have had to invent ways for computers to do something other than exactly what they were asked.
- Not sure if this was ironic. I guess it mainly fails because a lot of knowledge and experience is intuitive and not codified.by steve1977
- A friend of mine prepared an arsenal of hooks and the like to address this and LLMs still disobey them at times.
I don't have high hopes that there exists a bulletproof solution to this.
by Tade0 - 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.
by WarmWash - > This has nothing to do with LLMs and instead is almost certainly about their MAIVIS and AiTriz pilots
Where does this article say otherwise?
by chrisjj - Submitted title was "Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors", which is not what the article says.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We've reverted to the article's title now)
p.s. Article titles are sometimes rotated by the publications, in which case the submitter usually followed the guidelines but it takes time for us to catch up.
by dang - Yeah, it looks like this wasn't AI related. I hope yours grows to be the top comment!by Schiendelman
- Yes, it seems like many are missing the crucial aspect of the timing. The mistake was realized 3 years ago and auto design and manufacturing process lead times are long. Plus the occasion for the story was 'Ford returning to the top of the JD Power Quality Survey rankings', so that's another 6-18 months of reporting lag. That puts the original layoff mistakes being made 5 to 8 years ago.
I don't know when the "MAIVIS and AiTriz pilots" you mention were implemented but another possibility is the Ford PR team saw that 'AI Backlash' stories are currently trending and opportunistically focused on that to explain a positive news event which likely had many causes. IMHO, we should view these 'AI Backlash' themed stories as no more valid than the 'AI Downsizing' themes they previously seized on to justify layoffs they wanted to do anyway.
by mrandish - The article has named sources for its quotes, whereas your comment relies entirely on "almost certainly" which sounds a lot less informed.by calcifer
- "We didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers"
The defining motto of the corporate world
by barnabee - Change engineers to employees and you’re spot on.by grebc
- 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.
- This should be way higher.by d_silin
- Unions add another layer of bureaucracy to make small changes. This is the exact opposite of how software and technology works.
- This is a boom and bust industry. Projects come and go and only to a lesser extent if you work at a software company.
I would recommend IT/server administration as that is a constant business need, if you prefer stability with more limited upside.
- 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.by rmason
- Really? Ford’s quality in the last half of the 1990s was the poster child of cheap, vac-form plastics.by nativeit
- The same Ford whose bean counters caused them decades of reputational damage over skimping on rust protection? Seems like they haven't learned any lessons at all.by morkalork
- If a company is saying “X is job one” it’s because they suck at X. They sucked at quality. They still suck at quality.
- Ebbs and flows with these companies. If you got used to driving in the 70s then the FORD meme was “Fix Or Repair Daily”.by kortilla
- (As a non American) I remember hearing a joke that goes something like “How do you fix a Chevrolette? Buy a Ford”, but nowadays I guess a bike is a better optionby xprnio
- It's impressive all the recall notices I get on my 2020 Escape Hybrid. At this point I joke with my friends that they're love-letters from Ford.
(most of them are for fairly innocuous stuff...)
by AceJohnny2 - I think this may be a US thing. Fords built in Europe are pretty decent. Reliable (compared with most other makes), cheap parts and ubiquitous servicing. I've bought Fords (in the UK) for about the last 20 years and have in the main been very satisfied.by kitd
- It’s so odd to me how companies decided what LLMs are capable of without data backing it up. Were all the execs conned or something ?by wookmaster
- Fully red pilled, I literally cannot believe the rhetoric I’ve been hearing inside major companies.
- I'm not convinced that they needed to be conned. That assumes that they're normally able to correctly make this type of decision without a dedicated effort to trick them. (Not saying there wasn't any dedicated effort, just that they're capable of making decisions with similarly poor judgment on their own)by saghm
- Things have moved from "no one got fired for buying IBM" to "no one got fired for buying AI".
- They never use data to make decisions. I used to ask my managers for ROI analysis on new features they wanted to work on and they would stare blankly at me like I was speaking a foreign language. These people do things by "instincts" and for optics not because they've done any kind of analysis. Its easy for departments to be inefficient if your company is making billions of dollars per year. The million dollar losses go unnoticed.by phyzix5761
- For years many in management believed our value to the company was "just" in our ability to produce code. You could see it from how they would "resource" projects and write job descriptions and manage. The output of the job, to them, was code written / bugs fixed / features implemented. In organizations like this, software was a cost centre, and it was treated that way.
LLMs can write code. They're actually pretty good at it. So problem solved, right? Cost centre cost reduction. Bam!
In reality the more competent in the job were really good at understanding business problems and holding domain specific knowledge, working with the other people on the team to translate that into a problem a computer could solve, and with understanding and diagnosing what was happening in the broader system, not just in a "program."
Someone needs to write the prompts given to the LLMs and decide if what they came back with even makes any sense. Someone needs to respond to pages in the middle of the night. Someone needs to be able to look at the system and have a bigger picture understanding of how it fits with the business' needs, etc. etc. That's a software engineer.
I honestly think not enough in middle and upper management really understand what software development actually is.