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Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

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Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#301

Post by smoofles »

uejfiweun wrote: post #73
this_user wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of this was always to explore what is possible with AI as quickly as possible. Obviously, there is going to be a lot of waste, but the 5-10% of employees who are truly thinking about it and discovering novel applications are what you are truly after. Because right now, you effectively have a giant, as of yet poorly explored space of potential uses. Anyone who can find the actually valuable portions of the s…

The thing I don't get though, is that most people just don't have that much work they need to do. I can use AI to pretty easily get my work done just via the regular chat interfaces. But because of the tokenmaxxing metrics that leadership tracks, I end up just having the AI deliberate for hours on random things just so that I can boost my token numbers. I think tokenmaxxing for the end goal you described is only real…

Not being buried under a backlog of work is one aspect, and the other is that the sheer _urgency_ of these efforts makes it look like companies like Uber could be displaced in a year or two by someone who gets lucky with AI use.

Which absolutely isn’t the case. Even if someone would manage to overtake a market leader on tech merit alone, within 1-2 years, thanks to AI, markets don’t swing on such short notices. The fake urgency is absolutely psychotic.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#302

Post by KaiserPro »

darkwater wrote: post #232
KaiserPro wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we are going through our second AI transformation, the first one didn't work that well because the tools were shit. Whats happening now and whos driving it is interesting. The CEO has a license for this new tool (think one of the top 4, Qwen Claude, Gemini, openAI) and really likes it. So much so that they (non coder) are making lots of little single page web apps. The COO is bollocks deep in AI, and is saying that w…

Just...wow. That sounds awful, and I'm sorry for you, but I believe many other companies will or are already following that same path. And myself being an infrastructure guy that needs to maintain all these PoCs that are now suddenly critical for production, it's the perfect nightmare. And mind you, that dynamic always existed to a certain degree (laptop on a desk that runs some ugly Python script that does half the…

It would be fine if my boss actually followed the docs, or just pointed his agent at the docs.

Whats more annoying is that he changes AI provider lots, so we can never inject rules/skills to make sure he uses the right pathway from the start.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#303

Post by KaiserPro »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #221
KaiserPro wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases. Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, and sure I have nothing really to show for it, but for those three months, we had a lot of food fights" Your manager then goes on to explain they not only need more money to cover the food budget, but a…

Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, but we invented this new dish and now our restaurant is the hottest in town. Sure 95% of the food was wasted but now we can stop the waste and keep the popular dish."

Ok, but was that your intention in the first place? or was it to have food fights.

Thats the problem here. The idea is that we can build more stuff, quickly.

However in uber's case, they just burnt loads of money to push a metric that wasn't really related to productivity.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#304

Post by darkwater »

KaiserPro wrote: post #302
darkwater wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just...wow. That sounds awful, and I'm sorry for you, but I believe many other companies will or are already following that same path. And myself being an infrastructure guy that needs to maintain all these PoCs that are now suddenly critical for production, it's the perfect nightmare. And mind you, that dynamic always existed to a certain degree (laptop on a desk that runs some ugly Python script that does half the…

It would be fine if my boss actually followed the docs, or just pointed his agent at the docs. Whats more annoying is that he changes AI provider lots, so we can never inject rules/skills to make sure he uses the right pathway from the start.

There is probably some opportunity here for a centralized, internal only LLM proxy which injects AGENT.md and skills and permits switching backend providers.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#305

Post by smoofles »

symfoniq wrote: post #106
izanton wrote: post #29

What if... we stop for a moment, and then, after thinking for a moment, we stop hammering nails with a microscope, and stop using token usage as a metric of productivity? I know it's sounds stupid, but what if

There is a complete lack of courage in the leadership of tech companies today, and top-down AI mandates are just another manifestation. True visionaries think outside the box, but most tech executives are forcing their employees into black boxes, out of fear of not doing exactly what their competitors are doing. We have lemmings for leaders, and that means that—much like the LLMs that are being shoehorned into everyt…

Yeah courage will get you fired. Whether it be about idiot product decisions, or about how your bosses treat your coworkers. That’s the consequence of letting sociopaths get in charge.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#306

Post by smoofles »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #230
discreteevent wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI So if the people who embrace AI areore successful then the others will follow. Just like every other new tech. Why does AI have to be forced? What's the hurry? Especially when there's no clear example of a company jumping ahead because of their use of it. It's idiots being driven by FUD. That's the reason.

> What's the hurry? There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition. There's also a need to quickly adopt and understand the technology; take the Internet for example. If we were talking about the Internet, forcing teams to build and publish web pages would be one valid way to get teams comfortable with the tech, the workflow, the shift in how to propagate and convey information to an audie…

> There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition.

Those were always there, and will always be there. The type of time frames people are getting anxious about now rarely work in the real world, though, where potential customers don’t just switch products/service provides unless they’re facing catastrophic outcomes if they don’t.

And AI is not making the difference there that people think. I worked on a product that entered the market as a newcomer, wooed plenty of customers, and even though everyone _wanted_ it, only customers _urgently_ looking for a solution got on board quick (within Ironically enough, the product pivoting to Agentic AI hard killed a ton of momentum and interest from customers, despite exciting investors.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#307

Post by mips_avatar »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #298
dmazzoni wrote: post #201

I remember at Google at around 2007 - 2009, as Google was massively expanding its data centers, there was a lot of unused capacity, especially during off-hours. Any engineer could run as many jobs as they wanted at zero priority, which means the job would be first in line to be killed if a more important task needed the resource. I did so many interesting experiments with MapReduces that would run overnight. For a wh…

Most AI front ends seem to be designed for interactive jobs, so they make it hard to define a job that should be done eventually with zero priority. It makes much more sense to do that with spec-driven development (have work done with the human on the loop rather in the loop), but as far as I know that just isn’t well supported by any front end yet (would be happy to be proven wrong, my experience is with Google fron…

There’s a lot of places where an llm can improve a data pipeline. Like if Claude sonnet was free I’d do a lot of data enrichment.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#308

Post by vovavili »

onesociety2022 wrote: post #181
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument in favor of "tokenmaxxing" has always been that it's creating space for employees to freely explore the broad and novel space of AI-enabled workflows. I've seen a number of use cases where I'm skeptical any value is being produced, but a number of others where some team or another has finally solved a long-standing problem of theirs with an agentic workflow that would have been hard to justify to a cost…

+1 I find the general disdain for C-suite or senior engineering leadership on HN so silly. These people didn't get promoted or hired because of nepotism. A lot of them moved up the engineering ladder and are familiar with how software engineering works and the incentives involved. Yes, some of them are sheep and will blindly copy what is fashionable but so do a large swath of ICs. If you want incredibly fast adoption…

>These people didn't get promoted or hired because of nepotism. A lot of them moved up the engineering ladder and are familiar with how software engineering works and the incentives involved.

I would argue that you have an unreasonably optimistic view about corporate culture. There is a substantial amount of adverse selection and political maneuvering going on all the way up to the top. Tokenmaxxing just goes to show this.

That's part of the reason why this website is hosted under the YCombinator name, after all. Hackers are strongly meritocratic, which is not something you will find in a big company.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#309

Post by anon7000 »

starkparker wrote: post #256
iLoveOncall wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example in Seattle you pay county fees, and then state fees, and then maybe special fees if you were picked up in the airport. I took a ride from SEATAC to my hotel in downtown Seattle and besides the ride itself, there were 5 other items on the bill, 4 of which are specific to the place I used Uber. Then I had the return trip from my hotel to SEATAC, on this one I got EIGHT items on the bill, on top of the ride…

> I also took Uber in India, where you have to share a one-time password with the driver for example, which I've never seen in any other country. I was prompted for this on the US west coast this week. If that feature was ever India-only, I don't think it is now.

I’ve seen it extremely intermittently over the past 5 years so I have no clue where it’s enabled, but it’s seemingly not consistent

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#310

Post by arkadiytehgraet »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #277
arkadiytehgraet wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here, just a few examples over the last 9 days, in no particular order of exaggeration magnitude: Unsubstantiated claims of 3x-10x productivity at allegedly a FAANG: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174666 More claims of the same, still unsubstantiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173995 Even more claims of the same, still nothing of substance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173975 Outlandish…

This is so cool, I have my own fan on HN that cherry picks my comment history to call me a shill!

You could have easily disproved my claim by linking your comments with a more balanced or nuanced opinions on the matter, except you cannot, because there is only even more outlandish and wild stuff you say about AI and LLMs.
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