alt Hacker News> That Ford story was really misleading. It wasn't about modern LLMs, and the way it was reported implied that Ford had fired and then hired people but if you read closer that wasn't necessarily the case at all - it sounded more like they were re-hiring people who had retired because they needed expertise that had left the company.
Oh come on, Simon. Are your glasses so rose coloured they are opaque? They fired, and then re-hired because the AI couldn't do the job. They had to re-hire the quality folks. So, no, it wasn't LLMs, it was quality control -- which is a much more well established domain for automated systems. LLMs are a complete shitshow compared to industrial process automation.
Side question -- do you worry about being so pro-LLM when the promises of LLMs are so clearly falling short?
Show me evidence that they had previously fired any of the people who were hired.
Your comment is exactly the misinterpretation I'm pushing back against here.
The time period covered by this story starts three years ago! What kind of LLMs do you think they were using back then?
> Side question -- do you worry about being so pro-LLM when the promises of LLMs are so clearly falling short
I think my record is looking pretty good here. I was early to the "LLMs are useful for writing code" thing, especially with the code interpreter pattern (both write and then execute code in a loop) which I now realize was our first hint at coding agents.
A couple of years ago I was one of the few people talking about what a natural fit LLMs were for the commandline - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/17/cli-language-models/ With hindsight maybe I should have doubled-down on that!
I've also written plenty about the weaknesses of these models - in terms of security in particular - which has aged well.