I think the article is very deceptive in its framing. They spent 9% more; not $3.2B more. That’s $300m more which is frankly not that much. Firms spent way more than that on cloud adoption or before that web adoption in prior cycles.
Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall
81–90 of 114 posts
Re: Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall
#82I see things like 2 sentence menu summaries in Uber Eats that are completely off in tone. A quick sample from my app right now: “Authentic Caribbean Flavours. Jerk Chicken, Curry Goat, and more. A vibrant culinary journey awaits.” - local Caribbean place “Customisable burgers with 250,000+ toppings. Hand-cut fries and rich milkshakes await.” - Five Guys “Authentic Indian cuisine bursting with rich flavours. Perfect f…
> They’re investing in the wrong bits of AI
They’re investing on the wrong bits, not wrong bits of AI. No matter how many features they come up with after spending billions of dollars, customers are not any more likely to order food than they already are. The money is better spent reducing their atrocious fees and making sure the restaurant isn’t marking up every single menu item by 25%.
Re: Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never cared about those menu summaries! I always look at menu items and their descriptions. They are fine, at least to me.
More than half the menu item descriptions I see now are AI generated, and some are completely inaccurate.
I stopped ordering after I realized most places were using ai photos and descriptions. It’s worse than the stock images they’d use in the old days. It’s actively lying about what an item is.
Re: Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall
#84> According to The Information, Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga said Uber is now "back to the drawing board" after a surge in the use of AI coding tools, particularly Anthropic's Claude Code, has blown past internal expectations. Of usage costs? > The payoff is starting to show. Around 11% of Uber's live backend code updates are now written by AI agents, up sharply in just a few months. These systems p…
Only 11%!? Slackers. My team's project is 100% coding agent generated as pushed for by our dear leaders. Yes I'm very scared for when it all crashes down and really hope I'm not there when it does.
Re: Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall
#85I see things like 2 sentence menu summaries in Uber Eats that are completely off in tone. A quick sample from my app right now: “Authentic Caribbean Flavours. Jerk Chicken, Curry Goat, and more. A vibrant culinary journey awaits.” - local Caribbean place “Customisable burgers with 250,000+ toppings. Hand-cut fries and rich milkshakes await.” - Five Guys “Authentic Indian cuisine bursting with rich flavours. Perfect f…
Product reviews from real people are useful because they are allowed to say negative things.
Once you bypass the real reviews for a summary, all those useful negative signals get glossed over because the host platform doesn’t want to piss off the restaurants by propagating those negative comments.
Re: Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall
#86”Engineers were actively encouraged to use tools like Claude Code and Cursor, even ranking them on internal leaderboards based on usage” Token maxxing? Might explain high costs if you are actively encouraging developers to spend as much tokens as possible.
The good ol' measuring inputs, not outputs... (Other inputs from days of yore: number of people that report to you, budget allocation to your team. Nothing new under the sun!)
Is there an xyz's law for this yet? Will add - lines of code (as long as you don't believe code is the product/output).
Re: Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why does Uber need to spend 3.4B on injecting a useless blob of text between me and an overpriced burger delivered by a struggling illegal immigrant in a smoke-belching jalopy? I know the counter-argument. "This will increase sales". You know what else would increase sales? Spending the 3.4B to replace the above with a uniformed delivery service similar to UPS. That job could pay benefits.
> But why does Uber need to spend 3.4B on injecting a useless blob of text They didn't. 3.4B was their total R&B cost. Don't blame AI for your human hallucination.
Why does a fast food delivery service need a research arm in the first place? It's not exactly rocket surgery.
Re: Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall
#88Hi everyone. We are going to rate your performance directly on how much money you cost the company to do your job. The more money you spend doing your job, the better your performance review.
6 months later
Hi everyone. We are over budget.
Re: Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aside from the hilarious "250,000+ toppings" error, these summaries seem... fine? I would be unsurprised to learn that a human came up with them, even. Seems like pretty common/standard marketing copy.
Maybe each one is fine in isolation - what doesn’t come across from the sample is that every single one is practically the same. If you have Uber Eats, open up the app and look through the summaries for a bunch of restaurants and you’ll see what I mean. And besides that, this just feels like something nobody asked for that probably doesn’t sell more food compared to, for example, more pictures.
Most restaurant food is all the same though because they buy everything from Sysco.
Re: Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But why does Uber need to spend 3.4B on injecting a useless blob of text They didn't. 3.4B was their total R&B cost. Don't blame AI for your human hallucination.
Why does a fast food delivery service need a research arm in the first place? It's not exactly rocket surgery.
In most large tech companies the senior leaders want to run some vanity projects so having a research arm makes that possible. They can screw around without impacting product teams.