Introducing Ford AI Assistant in the Ford App 📱

[tls]

Ford AI is an LLM, not a physical agent, and it seems mainly designed to find and summarize information in the owner’s manual, charging FAQ, etc. It does have access to some “inside” information you won’t find readily accessible elsewhere. It relies on you to do any physical adjustments. It’s not great, but it’s not half-bad either. Better something than nothing.

I think the message we're both responding to makes it quite clear nobody thinks it is "a physical agent" and, nonetheless, as that message amply makes clear, it is not, in fact, "better than nothing"; it is considerably worse than the simple, deterministic software the vehicle already had.

I spend a good third of my time most days working with LLMs. They are very fine tools, if applied sensibly to appropriate problems. However, just like I do not need a "courageous" Ford engineering effort aimed at making it easier for me to steer my F150 using my nostrils, I see nothing courageous nor admirable about dumping scarce engineering resources Ford rather obviously needs elsewhere in an "LLM!!!1" box-checking exercise in our vehicles.

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[Jim Lewis]

@tls, you must have memorized the owner's manual then. Before the AI Assistant, I found both the PDF manual and the in-vehicle "ask the Ford "OK, Ford" app (that's dumber than Siri) something about your vehicle were atrocious experiences. The principal use of a decent LLM is a focused search that "understands" what your asking for and returns a focused answer, not 50 or more "kinda sounds like this might be what your search terms match" list. I guess folks who like Google Search can keep doing that sort of thing, but the most beneficial use of a decent AI assistant is to avoid the scattershot, time-wasting hit-or-miss information searches of yore. The Ford AI Assistant does an OK job, AFAIC, finding stuff I want to know out of the owner's manual. I hope Ford is not designing its AI Assistant in-house. But if you think it's not the future, just look at what Amazon and places like Home Depot are doing to their websites. The Alexa Shopping Assistant and the Home Depot Magic Apron assistant help you wade through a massive amount of product information and customer reviews on their website and do a pretty good job of it. Ford needs something like that to be competitive in the future. Just for folks who are shopping for new vehicles or who don't like trying to digest a 662 page owner's manual.

Maybe it's like the advent of iron weapons in the Bronze Age. The iron was hard to come by and it was softer than bronze, until folks discovered how to make it into steel. Everyone keep using your bronze weapons. You have a great future.