“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.
Time for another edition of “stupid or liar”
“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
Years ago I worked at an ISP tgat went through a merger. They decided they were going to outsource customer service to another company.
We all got nice severances and 3 months prior notice where we basically didn’t work because all calls were being routed to the new call center and we were just backup. What a great 3 months. We had card tourneys, spun up the companies old game servers and ran minecraft (alpha) on them, lots of fun.
Get laid off, fast forward a year and the outsource company has taken an 86% approval ratimg down to the low 30s.
They hired a lot of us back to completely rebuild the service department. I was tier 1 and got a 76% raise. I imagine others got better.
I bet the executives who made the decision gave themselves a bonus and are still working there despite the monumental blunder.
Executives fail upwards.
There can be value in having learned things the hard way. The decisions I made that resulted in melted piles of scrap really seared themselves into my memory, and help me make better decisions around those systems going forward.
Unfortunately, our corporate systems aren’t great at distinguishing people who gained valuable lessons from people who don’t recognize they screwed up.
ROFL that was not a mistake. They all knew what would happen.
yup, they just got caught doing it.
According to Poon, some of the company’s most experienced personnel left before all of their accumulated knowledge could be fully transferred into Ford’s automated systems. That necessitated bringing back some of those employees to retrain those systems…
See this, nothing was learned by these slop-shits. Their take away wasn’t humans-with-experience > than slop-bots. It was, unfortunately, ‘we didn’t extract enough knowledge from the humans that helped build our company before tossing as many humans away as possible. Once we’ve extracted enough, we’ll try again.’
Fuck you poon and co.
even if they can “put all the knowledge” in the LLM, its unlikely the thing would even be able to use it effectively without the same engineers anyways.
Funny how the capitalist narrative is that the CEO types “deserve” all they get because they worked hard and “built the company”, but employee’s that’ve been equally there for it’s hardship and growth, actually with their hands in the mud, actually have all the practical knowledge, yet are only on an income, are tossed aside at the nearest convenience because somebody smelled a bit more money.
Some of them really can’t be arsed to give back the community and systems that allowed them to flourish in the first place can they.
Locust swarm.
Sometimes I feel so blessed working for somebody that actually values people.
Let’s hope the humans learned their lesson and won’t teach the systems.
The point the grandparent comment is making is that there is no amount of teaching that will turn an LLM into a top engineer. The technology just isn’t there yet, not until OpenAI replaces all their own engineers.
Can’t blame AI for the fact that I know of at least 2 Ford transit vans whose turbo blew within 6 months 5 years ago, and a ranger with oil leaks
The only thing keeping ford in business here in Australia (other than the mustang), are the yobbos who want to believe Chy-na is producing bad cars still.
They’ve been producing crap for decades
They set the gas line like 3" above the turbo exhaust on the first Gen escape apparently not the 1st Gen but yeah (that doesn’t even have a turbo 🤦🏼♀️)
So they fired the executives responsible, right?
Lol. Probably got bonuses then celebrated for identifying the issue and fixing it.
No matter what, the parasites in the big club always fail upwards.
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.
I hope the team was paid a nice overtime fee. Otherwise they should have just let it fail.
Well, salaried, so not ‘overtime’ per se, but at least I walked away with a bonus equivalent to about 4 months pay. Not solely due to that one incident, but that incident put things over the top.
Good for you.
Here in Belgium, with salary contracts, there is still a calculated daily pay, IIRC it is monthly salary / 22.
If I work on a non-work day, I get 150% of this for a Saturday or 200% of it for a Sunday or public holiday.
sounds like a layoff is coming if they are doing this.
Well, it’s complicated. Basically my team has done this sort of work for a long time, but for a different market segment. This is a new market segment, but with respect to our work it acts the same. However executives don’t understand that, so they spun up another organization to deal. Further, the company that was supposed to do it instead of us had brand recognition in the market despite being terrible at the part of the work that we know how to do.
So we weren’t being replaced, we were seen as not relevant to this “new” market. That vendor wasn’t going to touch our market with a thousand foot pole.
What we seem to be settling into is for us to do it our usual way, then hand over to that revered company to finish it in a way to cash in on brand recognition and admittedly do things a bit more particular for that market after our usual jobs are done.
I would literally go “Nope, no going to happen, you deal with you making promises with estimates you yourself made up instead of listening to the experts”.
In fact, I’ve already done this in the past.
This as a good example of how people fail upwards.
If he had listened to us from the onset, this would have proceeded, he would have been maybe casually acknowledged for a solid enough job, business as usual even though the money in play was abnormally astronomical, leadership would have just taken this part of the business for granted.
Because he didn’t listen, he created a disaster. Because the disaster had just unimaginably large amounts of money attached with just stupid amounts more potential money in followup business, the executives were panicked. The ability to recover it on schedule suddenly they appreciated it, and he manages to bask in the spotlight.
Ok, so what if we had left him out to dry? We probably would have been fired. He probably would have too, but declining to assist and risking millions of dollars of business screws you too.
The upside? Well, this was noteworthy because this was the first time in many years I had to lose a weekend, so it’s not super common. To the extent stuff like this happens more regularly, it usually isn’t this bad and is more annoying but on normal business hours. This also happened close to review cycles, and was fantastic relevant information to hold over management so while I didn’t get broad recognition, I did walk away with the second largest bonus of my career. Also the project manager learned the lesson and his standard game plan for this sort of thing is now consistent with what we said. He fails upward, but at least he’s an ally for the foreseeable future.
Sounds like you need a union
The true mark of experience
If you have concerns like that always express them in an email as well as verbally, not only is it good for covering your own ass if you weren’t able to pull it out the fire (tbh I think you shouldn’t have busted your ass to make it work), but its also going to make people less likely to claim that unearned credit for your heroic work if you do.
That would make me quit on the spot. No notice. No explanation. Just get up and leave and not say anything word to anyone.
I’d sit there and work a shift, and tell them it’ll be ready in the week that I estimated at the kickoff.
its probably designed to make people “constructively dimissed.”
*Underpaying someone else to fix it.
trust me no, the follow up is often an overpay
For the work that’s being done, the people doing the work are most definitely underpaid.
mixed, i’ve seen them get massively overpaid but it was a short gig until fixed
in no way a good thing for the worker though cause they are still out of a job after
fire her for being caught for not OBFUSCATING THE lay offs as something else.
Can we start replacing executives with AI? Big money savings there, and you don’t even need a particularly good model
if anything the hallucinations will likely be less ridiculous
I’d settle for regular old I
All CEOs do is mindlessly follow trends; perfect use case for AI.
The CEOs already have and are getting paid to copy paste responses.
Could probably get the job done with a half-decent flowchart, really.
Executives make some major mistakes but never seem to be held accountable.
Probably invested more in AI.
HAHAHAHA
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…
I had they hope to previous thier double saliear
Durr regard made jokesers fucks it ip halwauthit
The joke is NOT I fucked up correcting myself editing it about it, the joke is that I care so much that I make this meta comment. That’s the level of joke we’re on
Is this a part of your op too?
Literally every i ds9s a government psyop
Thanks Obama
Hopefully those employees said, “Sure, I’ll come back, but my salary requirement is 50% more than you were paying me.”
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.
It would be great if all the workers would agree on this collectively, rather than just one offs.
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.
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.
Seems like we’re entering the “find out” phase…
We definitely are in some ways, but I don’t think this applies. Just the past month I’ve seen several articles about companies doing real work on scaling back AI use, which is good. But a bigger number are still fully invested and everyone who has any say about it have such an extreme AI psychosis that the companies, and possibly themselves, won’t survive.
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.
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.
They’ll never hear that though, they’ll hear what the want to hear, both via the people at the company and their own brain filter. Then they might see this and other articles but that doesn’t matter because they’re so far down in the hole of AI psychosis.
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.
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.
Yeah, I’d use it to write a boatload of garbage in the past but thankfully I’ve already been doing this for 10 years so I can actually spot the garbage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
100%, when you have a complex domain and business logic that already has a bunch of legacy spaghetti it’ll just make shit up.
Normally for bug fixes I ask the LLM to find it and then I tell it how to fix the bug which is a lot more hands and actually fixes the issue more often.
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.
VP should be fired.
