Ford has admitted to rehiring hundreds of human workers after its aggressive AI adoption strategy backfired.
The US automaker hired over 350 veteran engineers, referred to internally as “gray beards”, over the past three years in order to address mistakes made by automated systems.
The staff will lead quality reviews after the automation issues cost the company billions of dollars, Bloomberg reported, while some workers will also help improve and train the AI systems.
“We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems and not getting the desired results,” said Kumar Galhotra, Ford’s chief operating officer.
“We brought back technical specialists and they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.”
Those who think AI is like steam engine of new industrial revolution are both right and wrong. What they forget is that steam engine invented back in ancient Greece, and it didn’t spark industrial revolution until victorian times.
Those who push AI now will flop badly, because we still lack both necessary ingredients and necessary conditions for next economic revolution.
Thousands who will NOT be rehired because of your oopsie - People with families with completely disrupted lives, you visionless, incompetent fucks.
Okay, but we’re here to talk about corporate profits
Negative billions profit, yaaay
It didn’t backfire for upper level management, who bonused themselves already, now did it.
All the US automakers are the same. They went through this in the mid 2000s too. Back then it was cutting engineering staff to save profits and outsourcing.
Until that decision showed in Part Quality and they got downgraded by JD power and other industry measures. Then management tried save it by putting together teams to rebuild skills and consumer confidence.
One big issue was interior plastic panels with visible/touchable sharp split lines with flash. Picture shitty army men miniatures.
My niece cut her calf open on a razor sharp flash edge of a dodge map pocket. That’s how bad it had gotten.
One visit I went to the GM tech center to consult on some better part options, the office had about 150 cubicals and there were like 3 people working there. Outsourcing killed a ton of legacy knowledge with the layoffs.
Side point: Do you have any idea how hard it is to get downgraded by JD power? It’s a marketing firm. You pay for the awards. A lot. Hundreds of thousands for them.
Their QA was that bad. Still is. Used to be too.
Automation cost + automation issues cost + rehiring cost premium. That must be costly.
Yes. Pass it on to consumers.
Fine by me. Cars suck and I won’t buy one. Not that I could afford to even if I wanted
Does it really matter when the taxpayer is there to bail them out?
Ford never took the bailout they took low interest loans. Not to defend ford but they’re a better managed company than almost all other US car manufacturers. When even the smartest car manufacturer is making these costly mistakes it paints a pretty bleak picture
Ford never took the bailout they took low interest loans
Those low-interest loans are the bailout, friend. Six billion dollars.
Do you get low-interest loans with generous terms when you fail? I don’t. They should have been forced into bankruptcy like everybody else.
They don’t raise taxes anymore. That’s why everything is so expensive.
Sure they do, every year.
Everything is so expensive because of inflation, which is due to our friends at The Fed (which is a gang of private bankers that take turns screwing us). Don’t believe me? Look who works at the Fed
I mean in real terms, not absolute dollars. If they taxed away more than they printed, then the inflation would be tolerable.
Brought to you by the same people who forgot they are a car company and stopped making cars.
They did? What else is Ford making?
Trucks. The only car Ford makes any more is the Mustang.
Are you including SUVs and vans in “trucks”?
Yes, as the Federal Government does as well when it comes to emissions laws
Which brings us to why Ford doesn’t want to do cars, because the standards give them a break if it is a “truck”.
Ford made the model TT which was a truck (yes, just like the model T car) in 1924, that’s after selling an assemble yourself truck. The F series was introduced in 1948 and the F-150 is the most popular truck globally by a lot. They’re very literally the first to ever mass produce trucks… so idk what your comment is trying to say. Ford has made trucks as long as it’s made cars and is arguably one of the only vehicle manufacturers in the world that can claim to be a company that makes trucks as their original products over 100 years ago.
Hired back for the short term, I hope they realize…
Could be, but given how genAI has trained on the whole of recorded human knowledge and still can’t accomplish basic addition in many cases, chances aren’t awful that these people will remain essential, given that Ford insists on adhering to this imprecise process.
TL;DR: Don’t buy a Ford.
And the execs that made thr decision to fire in the first place will be punished by giving them bonuses.
Good replace garbage bad companies with new unionized private ones. Same for existing bad companies by unionizing the whole company stealthily
No more stock ones, no more 1 person breaking down other peoples decades of effort/work, no more enshittification, or rat-like behavior. No more bowing to “elites” or anything else
That sounded like a terrible idea anyway.
Give it a couple years and the fuel pump will go out
Not on my Mach E
Not an ICE vehicle ;)
Your mach E has a coolant pump.
‘We didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers,’ says automaker
No. You wanted to replace engineers who costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with a glorified chatbot because it cost less (for the introductory period only) and now you’re trying to save face because it blew up in your faces.
How do you know that the automation they’re talking about is LLMs?
Why are you defending technology that has shown time and time again to be a hinderance for the vast majority of uses?
Where did I defend anything?
Edit: probably a better question might have been “why would you think that the automation they’re talking about is LLMs”, since they don’t say it’s LLMs and it doesn’t make much sense for them to be talking about LLMs.
AI and automation cover a lot of stuff. Especially 3 years ago which this supposedly goes back to.
There is no justice in this. Mass layoffs with selective re-hiring was the plan all along. If AI wasn’t the excuse, “the economy” would be and it would look the same.
Disrupt the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, indiscriminately. Then bet on being able to get enough of them to come back on weaker terms, weaker contracts, and with reset seniority.
Ford hired AI
You don’t hire A.I. any more than you hire computers or equipment. They implemented AI, or used AI, or any other term referring to a thing and not a person.
