Feels like they are debating internally whether to cut people or AI spending. Very healthy debate. Let's hope they spare people.
Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
111–120 of 360 posts
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#112I have Opus 4.7 at work at 15x. Burns through tokens like water. It feels like one of these new mega datacenters is just for me. I'd love to know what the bill is, but we're just encouraged to do as much AI as possible.
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#113What 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
The people who have ascended to leadership positions are deeply divorced from reality. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
They get paid for saying whatever VCs want to hear and now that thing is "we have now become an AI-native company". The thing I'm still trying to understand is who is scamming whom
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide an example? What is different about running Uber services in Chicago vs. Indianapolis?
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…
Ah local regulations and fees. Not so much the core service algorithms. That makes sense.
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#115Tokenmaxxing is so dumb. You should never show your team how exactly you're measuring their performance; people will optimize for the metric, not the actual performance.
Classic Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#116I always used to wonder this about software stacks even prior to LLMs, but it seems more relevant now somehow: When will Uber (or your favourite company) be 'done'? They've been writing software for 16 years. They match drivers to passengers. More software isn't going to increase the chance that I seek them out instead of taking a bus or train. Will their software be finished in 20 years? 80?
Uber is at a large enough scale that this analysis doesn't work. You and I do not care even a tiny bit about "Eats for the Way", one of their planned features this year (https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/go-get-2026/) that lets Uber Black passengers specify that their car should arrive with their Starbucks coffee order. But if 0.01% of users order 1 additional ride a month because of this, that's about 200k rides a year, which may well be sufficient to justify the development costs.
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#117I always used to wonder this about software stacks even prior to LLMs, but it seems more relevant now somehow: When will Uber (or your favourite company) be 'done'? They've been writing software for 16 years. They match drivers to passengers. More software isn't going to increase the chance that I seek them out instead of taking a bus or train. Will their software be finished in 20 years? 80?
shiny new tools but people only want to use them on the same old problems. how can we innovate the development of crud apps even more?! that was what plagued the web dev landscape for some time. Constantly seeking newer lazier means of producing the same old product. I admit it has an allure but if companies are no longer constrained by dev effort / labour then they can only ponder their own reflection as the source of their failures.
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#118What 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
If there are any tech CEOs out there reading, I can offer my services. I will pointlessly burn unfathomable amounts of tokens, in parallel, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all for you. Think big big big numbers of tokens, you know whats cooler than a trillion tokens, a quadrillion tokens.
Lets talk my bonus, I will open the bidding at $1 per token.
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#119If any company announces that they use token consumption as an employee performance signal, for me that's close to a red flag to stay away from that company. No company with good engineering leadership should act like this is remotely a good idea.
Tokens are the new "lines of code per engineer". Easy to graph, easy to "manage".
The new TPS reports!
Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing
#120What 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
You're now in the last frame of the comic, getting thrown out the window.
Maybe it's time we adopt/design an economic system that isn't so easily co-opted by counterproductive prisoner's dilemmas.