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Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

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Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#11

Post by dangus »

xingped wrote: post #8
dangus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don’t understand on the customer side of B2B why so many companies actively encouraged AI tooling costs. I can understand it from the side of the companies selling tokens and AI hardware. I don’t understand the race to spend more on internal tools. I’ve been sitting around waiting for my company to buy a number of necessary bits of tools. They cheap out on every solution imaginable. Datadog is too expensive,…

Nothing that C-execs and management advocates for has made any sense for a long time now. If this is the first you're starting to question it all, I must ask what rock you're sleeping under because I desperately need a really good nap...

I knew they were stupid, I just didn’t know it got way down to this level

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#12

Post by pjmlp »

dangus wrote: post #6
deaton wrote: post #4

Goodhart's law strikes again. Stop giving your engineers token-burning quotas or they'll burn tokens.

I really don’t understand on the customer side of B2B why so many companies actively encouraged AI tooling costs. I can understand it from the side of the companies selling tokens and AI hardware. I don’t understand the race to spend more on internal tools. I’ve been sitting around waiting for my company to buy a number of necessary bits of tools. They cheap out on every solution imaginable. Datadog is too expensive,…

I surely remember everyone does SOA, everyone does NoSQL, everyone does Hadoop, everyone does microservices, everyone does kubernetes,....

Not with the same pressure as everyone in the company (literally everyone, regardless of the job role) has to burn AI tokens, and attend forced AI workshops, still it is always running after the next new shinny.

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#13

Post by ambicapter »

dangus wrote: post #6
deaton wrote: post #4

Goodhart's law strikes again. Stop giving your engineers token-burning quotas or they'll burn tokens.

I really don’t understand on the customer side of B2B why so many companies actively encouraged AI tooling costs. I can understand it from the side of the companies selling tokens and AI hardware. I don’t understand the race to spend more on internal tools. I’ve been sitting around waiting for my company to buy a number of necessary bits of tools. They cheap out on every solution imaginable. Datadog is too expensive,…

Nobody wanted to admit that they had no idea how "AI" was going to help but nobody wanted to get left off the hype train...so they tasked their engineers to figure something out...by just asking them to spend as much as possible (As I explain this it just sounds stupider and stupider). Of course, spending willy-nilly is not a good way to find a profitable (or smart) idea, but that's a problem for future company bottom line.

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#15

Post by kevincox »

dangus wrote: post #6
deaton wrote: post #4

Goodhart's law strikes again. Stop giving your engineers token-burning quotas or they'll burn tokens.

I really don’t understand on the customer side of B2B why so many companies actively encouraged AI tooling costs. I can understand it from the side of the companies selling tokens and AI hardware. I don’t understand the race to spend more on internal tools. I’ve been sitting around waiting for my company to buy a number of necessary bits of tools. They cheap out on every solution imaginable. Datadog is too expensive,…

The logic is quite simple. Management thinks that AI can improve productivity, but knows that there will be some resistance and some learning curve. So they force people to use it so that people can 1. develop their skills and workflow and 2. find out where it is useful 3. find out what needs to be improved to make it useful.

As a more obvious example consider that cars were just invented and the post office management thinks that they could improve performance of letter carriers. But right now cars are slow, break down a lot and there isn't much infrastructure for them. Lots of letter carriers will (rightly) think that it is a waste of time because they need to get in, stop, park between every house and they break down so often it isn't worth it and half of their route is unsuitable for a car anyways. But if cars are forced for a while they will find out what routes work well for cars and which don't, improve the cars and related infrastructure to make cars more effective and other improvements to unlock more productivity.

So yes, right now management is wasting money on cars and gas for no increased productivity. And yes, measuring how much gas each employee uses and encouraging to use more is obviously stupid in isolation. But the idea is to force adoption to iron out the kinks and find out where it can improve productivity. It is basically funding a research project.

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#16

Post by [deleted] »

dangus wrote: post #6
deaton wrote: post #4

Goodhart's law strikes again. Stop giving your engineers token-burning quotas or they'll burn tokens.

I really don’t understand on the customer side of B2B why so many companies actively encouraged AI tooling costs. I can understand it from the side of the companies selling tokens and AI hardware. I don’t understand the race to spend more on internal tools. I’ve been sitting around waiting for my company to buy a number of necessary bits of tools. They cheap out on every solution imaginable. Datadog is too expensive,…

[deleted]

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#17

Post by hilariously »

dangus wrote: post #11
xingped wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing that C-execs and management advocates for has made any sense for a long time now. If this is the first you're starting to question it all, I must ask what rock you're sleeping under because I desperately need a really good nap...

I knew they were stupid, I just didn’t know it got way down to this level

Strategy - just doing what your friends on the golf course are doing.

The number of times I have been told "oh I talked to so and so and they are having SUCH a good time using X" and then three years later "oh I talked to so and so and they got rid of X as soon as they could, we should switch!"

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#18

Post by Mistletoe »

It feels like maybe the wheels are starting to fall off the AI hype train. I expect complete collapse once people start figuring out that the numbers on all this don’t make sense. I’m looking for investment portfolios that will weather that storm. If you are reading this and have a similar curiosity, this is a great place to start.

https://portfoliocharts.com/2021/12/16/three-secret-ingredie...

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#19

Post by ryandrake »

newaccountman2 wrote: post #10
fancyfredbot wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently: * In App Hotel bookings in partnership with Expedia. * Travel Mode with suggestions on where to eat and visit when travelling. * Eats for the way - your driver picks up a takeaway for you to eat while they drive you to your destination. * Voice bookings using AI and speech to text. How did we ever live without them!

Holy fuck, aside from the voice bookings, that's some useless shit to spend money building as far as both tokens and salaries go. Are they profitable yet lol

This seems like the doom of all tech companies that hit a single kernel of a good idea, hire a big development team to build it, and then, once it's running well and making money, leadership looks around and sees this big body of developers, product managers, project managers, QA, and management tree, looking around for something else to do. Then, instead of saying, "Let's find the next big thing to do," they say, "Cram dozens more things into the thing that already works. Anything you can think of, spin up a team of 10 to bolt it onto the main product. Move things around to make everything fit. Run experiments on users to see if this new crap moves the metrics. A/B test to see what we should keep and what we should silently remove next update. Attach this other company's product that we just bought."

In a few years, what do you end up with? The modern version of every single fucking app we use today.

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#20

Post by rtkwe »

Mistletoe wrote: post #18

It feels like maybe the wheels are starting to fall off the AI hype train. I expect complete collapse once people start figuring out that the numbers on all this don’t make sense. I’m looking for investment portfolios that will weather that storm. If you are reading this and have a similar curiosity, this is a great place to start. https://portfoliocharts.com/2021/12/16/three-secret-ingredie...

I've been thinking that for years about various sources and the bubble stubbornly refuses to pop on a convenient timeline so I'm falling back on the adage "time in the market beats trying to time the market". Index funds and chill is much more relaxed than trying to determine who's actually going to survive the AI bubble popping.
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