“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.

  • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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    7 hours ago

    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

  • stringere@sh.itjust.works
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    17 hours ago

    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.

    • WhoIsTheDrizzle@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      I bet the executives who made the decision gave themselves a bonus and are still working there despite the monumental blunder.

      • Lyrl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 hours ago

        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.

  • auzy1@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    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

    • MML@sh.itjust.works
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      11 hours ago

      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 🤦🏼‍♀️)

  • portifornia@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      11 hours ago

      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.

    • kevinsky@feddit.nl
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      1 day ago

      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.

    • 0x0@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      Let’s hope the humans learned their lesson and won’t teach the systems.

      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        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.

  • Pulsar@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    People forget that AI models are great prediction systems, but as such the make very interesting blunders. If you are generating an essay, summarizing a meeting or just making cat memes that level of precision is acceptable. But I don’t see AI replacing human in anything that requires exactitude, predictability or intuition.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      11 hours ago

      they arnt even that great at predicting, just better at summarizing info they gathered, but unable to verify if the sources are actually true or not.

    • kboos1@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Lol. Probably got bonuses then celebrated for identifying the issue and fixing it.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        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.

        • hayvan@piefed.world
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          4 hours ago

          I hope the team was paid a nice overtime fee. Otherwise they should have just let it fail.

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
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            4 hours ago

            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.

            • hayvan@piefed.world
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              3 hours ago

              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.

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            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.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 day ago

          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.

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            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.

        • Womble@piefed.world
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          1 day ago

          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.

        • ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          That would make me quit on the spot. No notice. No explanation. Just get up and leave and not say anything word to anyone.

          • Triumph@fedia.io
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            14 hours ago

            For the work that’s being done, the people doing the work are most definitely underpaid.

            • baines@lemmy.cafe
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              14 hours ago

              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

    • Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 days ago

      Can we start replacing executives with AI? Big money savings there, and you don’t even need a particularly good model

  • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    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.”

    • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

  • TryingToBeGood@reddthat.com
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    2 days ago

    Hopefully those employees said, “Sure, I’ll come back, but my salary requirement is 50% more than you were paying me.”

    • one_old_coder@piefed.social
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      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.

      • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        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.

    • M137@lemmy.today
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      14 hours ago

      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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

  • Doug@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • M137@lemmy.today
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      15 hours ago

      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.

    • Cherry@piefed.social
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      2 days ago

      Your thinking like a logical person…not a sycophant with an entitled attitude to their gains.