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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'

#131

Post by bluGill »

y0eswddl wrote: post #125
thewebguyd wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> because the tech industry is at a whole is out of creative ideas

This isn't true. However the tech industry is out ideas that apply to many many people and scale well.

Most people need a word processor at some point in their life (if your school doesn't make you write at least one paper on a word processor then your education failed - you might never do it again in your life but it is still an important skill), but those were already powerful enough in the 1980s, and the 1990s solved most of the usability issues.

Robotic vacuums can get some more innovation, but the obvious next steps are unsolved problems (I want it to pick up before it cleans) that may not be solvable for a reasonable price.

There are however a ton of niches that could use more technology. However because they are niches they don't scale. You can make millions (gross profit) if you can solve their problems, but not tens of millions - this is enough to get your personally a nice lifestyle if you run or work for such a company (think a 3-5 person company), but even if you could interest an investor there isn't enough for them to skim off any profit and still make money.

Not all niches that need tech are that small. There are a few large ones, but they are hard to find (if they were easy someone would have done it already). There are also a lot of what looks like large ones that either are not large, or are not large enough to pay for the investment needed. There are also some medium sized places that tech can help. Once in a while there are even tiny places where someone can make a difference (but generally this means you do the thing as your business and tech as a hobby after work)

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

#132

Post by PearlRiver »

dotancohen wrote: post #36
joenot443 wrote: post #30

Earlier 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'm not sure how it would show up in quarterly results. Technical debt is famously difficult to express in either layman's terms or financial terms.

Everything can be expressed in financial terms- it is one of the guiding principles of the universe. Anyone who thinks they are above or beyond it will rue the day.

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

#133

Post by seiwj »

DesiLurker wrote: post #75

I actually think Chinese models have already popped the bubble, we just dont see it yet. the only way to justify AI IPO market cap is basically if they get to hold most sw industry code hostage and then token-flate budgets to collect AI tax. short of that AI expense would very quickly mean revert to model + some margin. this means the moat for AI 'trillion club' is gone. In fact AI virtually guarantees that there is…

Agreed.

We have to wait a whole year (sigh) since firms generally wait a whole financial year to do critical reviews

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

#134

Post by stephen_cagle »

izzydata wrote: post #62
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…

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…

I feel like this is kind of like the gambler's risk of "going bust" but applied backwards?

Feels like it would be better to spend just enough so that you have the capacity to scale up IFF LLM's end up being a big deal. You spent less than your rivals (who were competing for a supremacy that never came), but you have saved more "dry powder" to compete against them for the more likely future. The only future you exclude with this strategy is the "LLM Supremacy" future, which you only had a 1/(number_of_players) chance of winning anyway. :]

I think the real reason for the spending is that the scent of LLMs in the air causes stock values to go up. And even if everyone knows it does not make sense, they still want "NUMBER GO UP", and so they will spend more money to excite the amateur and professional investor class.

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

#135

Post by nobodyandproud »

charcircuit wrote: post #102
nobodyandproud wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's little different from the mainframe/mini computer to the PC: Huge servers and resources will be better--no dispute there--but good-enough will be achieved using local resources.

There are privacy and general de-centralization reasons to prefer this outcome, even though most AI and cloud-first tech companies don't want this.

How long it will take us to get this point is a different matter.

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

#136

Post by dotancohen »

PearlRiver wrote: post #132
dotancohen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure how it would show up in quarterly results. Technical debt is famously difficult to express in either layman's terms or financial terms.

Everything can be expressed in financial terms- it is one of the guiding principles of the universe. Anyone who thinks they are above or beyond it will rue the day.

I hope that you never loose a child and remain so naive.

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

#137

Post by dylan604 »

niwtsol wrote: post #81
dylan604 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:

You don't use AI at all? What is your main justification for not?

I don't like outsourcing learning and prefer to do the actual learning. Just like taking notes via recorder vs writing them down during a lecture causes you to not remember the information as well. Allowing something else to create your code tends to mean you're not going to remember/know the how/why it works and you just accept it works and moves on. Eventually you don't know how any of it works and you're totally dead in the water without the LLM. My understanding of the code I write is much more valuable than some arbitrary deadline that means nothing

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

#138

Post by bensyverson »

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 don't think "90% correct in a tenth the time" is really the tradeoff. For a well-specified task, it's closer to 100% correct in 1/100th the time. But that undersells the time required to generate a good spec.

For under-specified tasks, it's not really accurate to talk about "correctness," because the machine isn't psychic. I would suggest that given a high-level feature request like "add streaming support" it's more about acceptance probability. In a well-structured and well-documented codebase, and a reasonably sized feature request, there might be an 80% chance it will generate something which is 100% acceptable. But there's about a 99% chance it will generate something which is acceptable after 1-2 revisions.

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

#139

Post by ath3nd »

bensyverson wrote: post #138
aantix wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't think "90% correct in a tenth the time" is really the tradeoff. For a well-specified task, it's closer to 100% correct in 1/100th the time. But that undersells the time required to generate a good spec. For under-specified tasks, it's not really accurate to talk about "correctness," because the machine isn't psychic. I would suggest that given a high-level feature request like "add streaming support" it's mor…

[dead]

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

#140

Post by gamblor956 »

Outside of tech, most companies have already begun pulling back and cancelling their AI spend. (The trend actually started last year.)

Most of the time, the tasks that AI would take over aren't the bottleneck in the business process, so having AI do something faster isn't very useful. It's definitely not useful enough to justify spending more than two digits a month on a recurring subscription, but the price point at which AI is a viable product is far below the price point necessary to sustain even a single AI company.

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