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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'

#111

Post by 2001zhaozhao »

aantix wrote: post #92
niwtsol wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% - I think that is also part of the divide you see online. Devs who work on massive codebases w/ 100s of engineers and see the bugs the LLMs create vs devs who work on smaller codebase w/ small <5 person team.

It's a tradeoff. Generating a feature that is 90% correct in a tenth of the time is a reasonable tradeoff if you're trying to gain traction. Generating a feature that is 90% correct in a tenth of the time, risking a multi-billion-dollar business, is a terrible tradeoff.

I think it's rather:

Small teams building continuously get to write features that are 90% correct in a tenth of the time.

Big enterprises get to write features that are 90% correct barely twice as fast, because all of the bottleneck lies elsewhere. They also spend more on AI per user because of the internal dynamics pushing people to adopt AI irresponsibly. They can correct the 10% of errors slower than small teams because of bureaucracy, increasing the cost of errors that show up in the product. Furthermore, they have less to gain from a given amount of speedup because they had plenty of engineering velocity anyway compared to small teams.

I don't think big enterprises will start winning from AI technology until AI truly can automate almost everything in a company and let said company outproduce competitors by burning tokens alone. That's nowhere near possible right now.

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

#112

Post by layer8 »

nlawalker wrote: post #29

I 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…

To the extent that figuring out the true automation will lead to layoffs, that knowledge will quickly spread as the laid-off knowledge workers are available for hiring.

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

#113

Post by 12_throw_away »

palmotea wrote: post #74
LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell me you're being sarcastic.

It's industry best practice. All the market-leading companies are doing it. Do you think you know better than them? If there's anything I've learned as a software engineer, it's that agreeing with and defending the ideas of business leaders and Silicon Valley VC influencers proves I'm very intelligent.

this sarcasm is very disrespectful, you're mocking a sizeable proportion of the commenters on this site.

when I quote this comment later, with appropriate attribution, please know that I will be shaking my head and frowning while doing so

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

#114

Post by jimkleiber »

I wish they would spend some of that on the help/support function within their apps. Whenever I have a problem on Uber, it feels like a never-ending maze to figure out how to get any support, and I consider myself versed in navigating unseemly UI, I can only imagine how much it might frustrate people who struggle navigating apps.

Any idea why their help function seems to impenetrable and if AI might help with it?

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

#115

Post by thewebguyd »

12_throw_away wrote: post #104
bluGill wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's what throws me off about the AI hype. I've lived through plenty of other hype cycles, but none had such rapid adoption as this during the hype phase. Usually its a bunch of early adopters and a few doomed startups, with the big established (non tech) companies never fully jumping in, and then by the time they might have considered it, the fad died.

Even "cloud" which did stick around and actually did pan out, didn't see such immediate adoption during the hype. There were a lot of companies that stayed on-prem for a long time, many which still are, and none of them imploded for not jumping on the hype.

Why is the FOMO so strong with AI this time around? I don't ever recall being told "spend as much money on AWS as you possibly can!" during the cloud hype...

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

#116

Post by cdud3 »

jrmg wrote: post #82
izzydata wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression of companies pushing AI so heavily is that they are basically being forced to do it by it merely existing. Imagine if AI really is as powerful as it is suggested to be and you didn't jump on the bandwagon. Then you would be behind. So by it existing and other companies using it, you have to as well because even if it turns out to be a failure at least everyone else will have failed too and you are on an…

You could kind of use that line of thinking to justify spending on anything.

Not on anything but on some things like “Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM”

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

#117

Post by electroly »

testbjjl wrote: post #64
louiereederson wrote: post #44

Anthropic's annualized run rate is >$40b according to outside reporting. AWS hit that by Q4 2019. There were still debates on public cloud vs on prem at that time, but by late 2019 public cloud had facilitated the creation or adoption of entire categories of software within SaaS and PaaS, not to mention consumer internet businesses like Uber and Airbnb. The net impact of AI coding tools is far more ambiguous in compa…

Amazon was AWS first customer. I sometimes feel if the AI companies promises of their models replacing all SWE, they would be a top 3 product/service in any number of businesses and not selling shovels to miners.

> Amazon was AWS first customer

It wasn't. The retail business took years to move to AWS. They could not even be described as early adopters of AWS.

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

#118

Post by butlike »

hintymad wrote: post #105
nlawalker wrote: post #29

I 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.

> action leads to information, iterations lead to enlightenment

So doing something (action) creates something new (more information), and iterating on that new information leads to the realization there is nothing new left to be learned with that information (enlightenment). Is how I'm interpreting that.

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