You don't need justification to spend other people's money!
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Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
101–110 of 167 posts
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#102I never took tokenmaxxing to be about improving productivity directly; mundane feature work that comes out of it is just a side effect. I always saw it as a race between these big tech companies to get a generational advantage by being the one to discover the way of the future , with respect to harnessing AI to actually and truly automate software development. EDIT: whoa, I used "way of the future" as a reference to…
My hot take: The way of the future is local LLMs. The AI equivalent of the PC revolution isn’t quite here yet, but it’s the only way forward.
It will always be worse compared to a centralized approach where hardware utilization can remain high. Except in case which demand low latency which most development things do not need. It's okay if it takes an extra 100ms for a code review to take place.
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#103Earlier 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,…
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 manageme…
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Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could kind of use that line of thinking to justify spending on anything.
There is a fad every few years that uses similar thinking to justify spending. Sometimes they work out sometimes they don't. But they never work out as good as the most optimistic predictions.
> Sometimes they work out sometimes they don't
Genuinely asking: for which fads was it actually beneficial to jump in during the hype phase? Was there ever anything so critical that there was some huge disadvantage if you didn't adopt it right away?
ETA: I suppose the complicating factor, at least for B2B, is "customers demanding $fad", particularly when the purchasing decision makers don't actually understand what $fad is (e.g., "cloud", "blockchain", "ai", ...). If you don't become "$fad native" right away, you lose the Dunning-Kruger segment of the market.
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#105I never took tokenmaxxing to be about improving productivity directly; mundane feature work that comes out of it is just a side effect. I always saw it as a race between these big tech companies to get a generational advantage by being the one to discover the way of the future , with respect to harnessing AI to actually and truly automate software development. EDIT: whoa, I used "way of the future" as a reference to…
> by being the one to discover the way of the future
This is my understanding too. The underlying assumption is that action leads to information, iterations lead to enlightenment. So from an org's point of view, tokenmaxxing means encouraging everyone to explore as much as they can. Of course, token volume should not be the only metric - tokenmaxxing is just a catchy phrase.
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
A friend of mine added some pretty extensive iOS UI tests to a keystone feature hit by millions every month. They'd been kicking the can down the road for years, trying to fit it in their roadmap, and with Claude running overnight they were able to bang out the whole suite in a week. I'm not sure how it would show up in quarterly results.
I see these kinds of stories here a lot, and I'm curious whether they reflect a steady stream of need for AI coding, or whether a lot of companies have a burst of AI-appropriate coding work now that the technology is available and then will have a smaller need going forward. Is it like the stereotypical dad who rents a power washer, powerwashes every exposed surface on his property, and then doesn't need to do any po…
Nah in competitive industries you need to build features and out compete people and getting AI to do that whilst architecting things well due to experience and having time to think more about the important stuff but have a lot of the more boilerplate and simple things ABs plumbing etc handled by agents is great.
When you try to replace your entire brain with AI things are going to go wrong.
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#107It 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...
Market makers are not going to let anything collapse, there is not going to be a "storm".
The government and everyone with any money/power are fully invested in keeping the market going regardless of any kind of reality.
"Every American child under 18 with a Social Security number can have a federally recognized "Trump Account," a one-time $1,000 IRA seed deposit"
By doing this every citizen will personally have skin in the game and want markets to continue to rise.
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#108Didn't google say that AI had increased their company's productivity by 10%? if that's the case, then how can they justify spending 50% to 100% of wages on it?
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#109Now feels like a very good time to be a small team of experienced developers who can largely work on stuff by themselves and not a corporation of hundreds of developers of varying abilities all now trying to show how much code they can generate and how many tokens they can burn.
Even small teams are not immune from the AI push. I work in a small not using AI while receiving push that I'm a problem for not. To the point, VP of company says if we don't all start using AI we'll be out of business because other people will. :face-palm:
To be clear I meant it's good to be small team on the assumption that we're all using AI... I honestly can't imagine not using AI in May 2026.
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#110I never took tokenmaxxing to be about improving productivity directly; mundane feature work that comes out of it is just a side effect. I always saw it as a race between these big tech companies to get a generational advantage by being the one to discover the way of the future , with respect to harnessing AI to actually and truly automate software development. EDIT: whoa, I used "way of the future" as a reference to…
My hot take: The way of the future is local LLMs. The AI equivalent of the PC revolution isn’t quite here yet, but it’s the only way forward.
I agree.
We don't need a nondeterministic 10quadrillion vector model.
We need an deterministic expert on our narrow business.
Something small, that can be run on the 2026 version of the spare PC under the CTOs desk.