Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 167 posts

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

#121

Post by returnInfinity »

afavour wrote: post #63
Legend2440 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if Uber really did double developer productivity, would it translate to quarterly results? Ultimately they make money selling rides, not selling software. The Uber app is mature and adding new features is unlikely to significantly increase sales. Writing 2x more code doesn't translate to 2x more revenue unless it results in 2x more rides.

> Even if Uber really did double developer productivity, would it translate to quarterly results? It would if it meant they then fired half their software engineers, which is the ultimate goal.

Even if they lower costs to 0, it means nothing

Topline growth matters more than costs.

Mathematically - There is no limit to topline growth But cost cutting has a ceiling, which is the current costs.

You can only make(save) so much money with cost cutting

Topline growth is upper bound by total energy in the universe though.

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

#122

Post by pfannkuchen »

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.

Only lemming spending. Where the first few lemmings have to justify it some other way.

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

#123

Post by newaccountman2 »

generalpf wrote: post #93
newaccountman2 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard of someone doing that tbh, this is the first time.

You can get any Uber driver to do it for you if you offer to buy them food too and do it off the books.

I didn't say I doubted it was possible lol, just that I had never heard of anyone doing it.

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

#124

Post by basch »

groby_b wrote: post #96
tracerbulletx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is right. Its about taking the throttle off of experimentation hoping some team suddenly starts shipping a years worth of features in a week and responding to strategic customer demands in near real time. Then copying what works out across the org. (and probably downsizing)

What those organizations miss is that they drown their teams in organizational red tape. The way to the future isn't tokenmaxxing - it's cutting back on process noise.

It was very easy to see before this started that the models were just repetitive inflators.

It’s not that they should “scale back” their use as much as the metric should be improvement/tokens. Tokens used is a denominator in any worth calculation.

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

#125

Post by y0eswddl »

thewebguyd wrote: post #115
12_throw_away wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

because the tech industry is at a hole is out of creative ideas. That why ever seen so many hype cycles since the end of zirp - and why the only innovation we're seeing is on ways to squeeze more money out of people. and AI was sold as a salary cutting magical money machine... AKA one more hype to jump on.

except this one a isn't making anyone rich besides Nvidia

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

#126

Post by waqarjaved »

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…

[flagged]

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

#127

Post by marrone12 »

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.

But they do use their models internally quite a bit. Claude code head talks about how he doesn't write any code himself anymore and just uses agents to do everything. So they are using it themselves.

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

#128

Post by Legend2440 »

returnInfinity wrote: post #121
afavour wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if Uber really did double developer productivity, would it translate to quarterly results? It would if it meant they then fired half their software engineers, which is the ultimate goal.

Even if they lower costs to 0, it means nothing Topline growth matters more than costs. Mathematically - There is no limit to topline growth But cost cutting has a ceiling, which is the current costs. You can only make(save) so much money with cost cutting Topline growth is upper bound by total energy in the universe though.

Topline growth is more realistically bounded by the number of people willing to take an Uber at a given price. You can't expand forever.

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

#130

Post by sscaryterry »

dylan604 wrote: post #79
rowanseymour wrote: post #52

Now 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:

He could be wrong, but in my opinion, he is probably right. Others are, and will be using AI.
Post reply on HN