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Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

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Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#341

Post by beering »

adi_kurian wrote: post #93
embedding-shape wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. Same but in regards to quotas. I'm on the 200 EUR ChatGPT plan, so presumable have the highest quota, using the "most expensive" models, on highest reasoning, in fast-mode (1.5x quota usage) and after a full day of almost exclusively doing programming with agents, I still get nowhere close to hitting my quota. In fact, since I started using…

Codex quota is suspiciously high right now. Either way, the subscription plans are not sustainable, and perhaps less relevant to any discussion about corporate API use. The prosumer developer plans are an insane deal. It is a golden age right now and it will end. If you tried to use the APIs to achieve the same thing, you would be spending thousands upon thousands of dollars a month. My completely unfounded conjectur…

I don’t think anyone has to sell inference below cost. If Anthropic is GPU-constrained, then it makes sense for them to charge much much more on API users and push subscribers towards extra billing, because that’s the only knob they can turn. OpenAI has much more capacity based on news reports.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#342

Post by joshred »

hyperbovine wrote: post #310
Galanwe wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. From my experience, this happens essentially by three means: - Level 0 (beginner users) long lived conversations: If you dont get in the habit of compressing, or otherwise manually forcing the model to summarize/checkpoint its work, you will often find people perpetually reusing the same conversation. This is especially true for _beginners_,…

> Just genuinely having 10 worktrees perpetually in parallel and cycling between them in between agent responses. Again, not necessarily bad in itself, but can exponentially conse credits. I'm pretty sure that growth is linear.

If you think about it, the production quality is probably log-linear, so the token growth may well be exponential.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#343

Post by beering »

jjcm wrote: post #322

Speaking as someone who's bootstrapping here, I'm often envious of engineers at these larger companies, but I also worry that the incentives are screwed up. If I were an engineer at Uber, why wouldn't I select gpt 5.5 pro @ very high thinking + fast mode for a prompt? There's no incentive not to use the most powerful (and thus most expensive) model for even the smallest of changes. I tried one of these prompts for so…

image->html is a pretty involved task though. That’s basically a frontend dev’s job. $40 wouldn’t cover an hour of their time.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#344

Post by performative »

Galanwe wrote: post #278
abuani wrote: post #17

I take a peak every month or so at spend for my company and notice more and more are consumed $1k in tokens a month and it is bewildering to me how. I use llms daily, and see anywhere from $200-$400 tops. This is using the most expensive models, in deep thinking mode. So I'm not a Luddite against the usage of them. I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. I genuinely challenge someon…

> I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. From my experience, this happens essentially by three means: - Level 0 (beginner users) long lived conversations: If you dont get in the habit of compressing, or otherwise manually forcing the model to summarize/checkpoint its work, you will often find people perpetually reusing the same conversation. This is especially true for _beginners_,…

as a new user of agents, i am realizing i'm using a strategy basically identical to level 0. is the typical approach to just make a CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md and start a new thread for each task or is it more complicated than that?

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#345

Post by risyachka »

Galanwe wrote: post #278
abuani wrote: post #17

I take a peak every month or so at spend for my company and notice more and more are consumed $1k in tokens a month and it is bewildering to me how. I use llms daily, and see anywhere from $200-$400 tops. This is using the most expensive models, in deep thinking mode. So I'm not a Luddite against the usage of them. I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. I genuinely challenge someon…

> I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. From my experience, this happens essentially by three means: - Level 0 (beginner users) long lived conversations: If you dont get in the habit of compressing, or otherwise manually forcing the model to summarize/checkpoint its work, you will often find people perpetually reusing the same conversation. This is especially true for _beginners_,…

>> Again, not necessarily bad in itself,

yeah, it is bad. Human brain is not able to properly assess this amount of changes. To understand even a small change you need a lot of capacity. To understand thousands of lines - impossible.

This is pure slop pouring into prod and we can see more and more consequences of this in all big corps's products - things start to break more and more exponentially faster.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#346

Post by KaiserPro »

ageitgey wrote: post #13
woah wrote: post #5

It's very easy to blow through hundreds of dollars a session using API tokens especially with the 1m context if you aren't careful about clearing old context. At the same time the subscription will allow the same usage for hundreds of dollars a month. Either Anthropic is absolutely hosing API users, massively subsidizing subscriptions, or a little bit of both.

Anthropic has a very "interesting" business model where you get subscription pricing as long as you are under 150 employees. When you hit 151, you have to start paying API prices overnight for everyone, and your total bill instantly multiplies. They are getting you hooked on cheaper tokens, then raking you in when you get scale. I'm sure Uber gets a break on list price, but I doubt they are anywhere near <150 employe…

You have to remember that enterprise pricing is covered by NDAs

But things to note:

1) the per user license fee is almost certainly waived.

2) if you look in teams, when you buy extra credit, you get a 30% discount if you buy in bulk.

Unless you default into enterprise from teams, you're almost certiantly not going to pay the list price for per token price

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#347

Post by maccard »

BeetleB wrote: post #170
abuani wrote: post #17

I take a peak every month or so at spend for my company and notice more and more are consumed $1k in tokens a month and it is bewildering to me how. I use llms daily, and see anywhere from $200-$400 tops. This is using the most expensive models, in deep thinking mode. So I'm not a Luddite against the usage of them. I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. I genuinely challenge someon…

First: There's the obvious "If the company is letting me do it, I'll be wasteful." This includes not clearing/compacting the context often. Opus now has a 1M context window, and quality is good to at least 200K. So each query is burning a lot of tokens until you clear/compact. People have already mentioned the size/complexity of the codebase. I'm new to my team and the codebase isn't huge, but it's large enough that…

> But the reality is that with Claude, I can get the work done in 1 day that would take me 5 days of struggling,

Is it really a 5x ROI? Where are all the apps, games, platforms, SAAS's, feature s that have been backlogged for 5 years that are all of a sudden getting done? Because I see a modest ROI, and an _awful lot_ of shovelware.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#349

Post by darkteflon »

adamnemecek wrote: post #338
hyperbovine wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just genuinely having 10 worktrees perpetually in parallel and cycling between them in between agent responses. Again, not necessarily bad in itself, but can exponentially conse credits. I'm pretty sure that growth is linear.

I think that you send the entire conversation with every request.

As long as you stay under the 1-hour caching TTL for your open threads, I guess your marginal cost is linear.

This is me on a weekday flicking between Ghostty tabs to enter “stand by” every ~45 mins.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#350

Post by beering »

internetter wrote: post #9
woah wrote: post #5

It's very easy to blow through hundreds of dollars a session using API tokens especially with the 1m context if you aren't careful about clearing old context. At the same time the subscription will allow the same usage for hundreds of dollars a month. Either Anthropic is absolutely hosing API users, massively subsidizing subscriptions, or a little bit of both.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/03/05/cursor-goes... "Cursor estimated last year that a $200-per-month Claude Code subscription could use up to $2,000 in compute, suggesting significant subsidization by Anthropic. Today, that subsidization appears to be even more aggressive, with that $200 plan able to consume about $5,000 in compute"

That’s based on Anthropic’s retail price right? Not a fair comparison, like saying that Netflix must be losing money because every movie rental is $4 and a Netflix subscriber can watch 20 movies in a month.
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