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

businessinsider.com

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

#11

Post by batch12 »

colechristensen wrote: post #5
illithid0 wrote: post #4

>"He said that, based on talks with Uber's senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features." Goodhart's law strikes again at someone with enough power to be both ignorant of it and make others suffer their ignorance. You cannot simply measure productivity by tokens spent just like you can't measure it by hours spent in a chair at a…

You can measure productivity by hours spent at a desk?

You can measure attendance by hours spent at a desk

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

#12

Post by chihuahua »

It's amazing that it took months to figure this out. "Well we thought that if engineers are told to maximize costs through AI use, to consume as much as possible of a resource that costs us money, then obviously good things will happen. Imagine my surprise when it didn't turn out that way."

Imagine if engineers were ranked based on their AWS spend. People allocate VMs and fill databases with terabytes of random bits, to get to the top of the AWS leaderboard. If you don't do this, you're ranked at the bottom, and good luck at the next review cycle. Who could have expected that this is not the road to success?

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

#13

Post by iwontberude »

gigatexal wrote: post #2

I find it useful that if they cut the use altogether I will pay for it out of pocket.

Except you won’t because they will threaten to fire you and force you to route all of your AI through data protection proxy to stop exfiltration by filtering and tracking prompts/response tokens.

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

#17

Post by cryo32 »

7777777phil wrote: post #9

As soon as tokens stop stop being subsidized, heavy agentic use will become as least as expensive than paying an (entry level) employee. When this happens many companies will trade off havy tolen usage for (maybe a bit slower, bit less accurate) employees again.

This is what I’m betting on.

The financials don’t make sense now. Based on the expenditure the finances won’t ever make sense.

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

#18

Post by epolanski »

colechristensen wrote: post #5
illithid0 wrote: post #4

>"He said that, based on talks with Uber's senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features." Goodhart's law strikes again at someone with enough power to be both ignorant of it and make others suffer their ignorance. You cannot simply measure productivity by tokens spent just like you can't measure it by hours spent in a chair at a…

You can measure productivity by hours spent at a desk?

Productivity is measured by economists in $/hour.

Which is why two identical jobs with the same real life output have drastically different productivity.

A nursing home in Luxembourg has 5 times the productivity of one in Romania despite the services being identical and tech-unrelated.

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

#19

Post by sottol »

Marciplan wrote: post #7
sottol wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that's the plan :) But on a more serious note, do we know how much Uber spent per technical employee/month? I assume it is far more than even any of those $200 "max ai" plans. And the other question is how much the public would be willing to spend, in my estimation this is as "cheap" as it will ever get (main-stream at least).

bigCo’s don’t get to do the $200 Max plans, they have unlimited plans but get charged like API

Exactly. But I did find an article ([1]) and spend doesn't seem that high per engineer ($150 to $250 per eng) - at least on average, I assume the costs were skyrocketing towards the end.

> Adoption climbed from 32 percent of engineers in February to 84 percent classified as agentic coding users by March. By spring, 95 percent of Uber engineers used artificial intelligence tools monthly, and roughly 70 percent of committed code originated from those tools. About 11 percent of live backend updates were written by agents with no human in the loop, according to Uber's own disclosures.

> The numbers behind the spend are what make the story instructive rather than anecdotal. Monthly cost per engineer ranged from $150 to $250 on average, with power users running between $500 and $2,000.

My guess is that the reason to rethink AI-spend was probably the exponential growth in cost over time, and tokenmaxxing payoff not being immediately obvious as mentioned in the article.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2026/05/17/uber-bu...

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

#20

Post by devttyeu »

batch12 wrote: post #11
colechristensen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can measure productivity by hours spent at a desk?

You can measure attendance by hours spent at a desk

Well if you're a devshop just billing hours of mostly low impact work then hours are very much equal to productivity.
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