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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'

#141

Post by jrmg »

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…

Sears, the obvious choice, could have been Amazon. There are plenty of other less extreme examples of defunct brick-and-mortar stores who were killed by internet competitors (often, Amazon).

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

#142

Post by ozozozd »

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…

This is an apples to some non-food item comparison.

AWS has so many analogs. It’s not as novel. Renting vs buying a home/car/anything is essentially what AWS brought.

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

#143

Post by rixed »

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…

Like many corporate behaviors I believe we tend to rationalize them too much. Most job posts for management ask for previous experience with "implementing AI". Managers don't want to be left out any more than devs. Devs rewrite everything in the language-du-jour, managers max out tokens.

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

#144

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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'm not the same person, but I don't really use it. I write better code than an LLM, and I do it faster than the time it takes to review and correct the LLM's bad code. The tool has no value to offer me.

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

#145

Post by ironmagma »

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.

Yes but that representation can be over-applied and misleading. For example you can roughly estimate the price of the entire earth. What does that number mean though? Well, nothing, really.

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

#146

Post by redhale »

jimkleiber wrote: post #114

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?

I think this is clearly be design. They don't want to provide support, they want you to give up and let your issue go.

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

#147

Post by redhale »

dwa3592 wrote: post #31

I am not sure how uber is operating internally around the use of tokens but if they actually shipped features faster than before then it is still a win. if they learn that users don't want these features or want a different version of it; they have learned this new knowledge faster than they would have if they manually coded those features, which means in principle you should be able to iterate faster. but this will…

This is "Feature Factory" thinking, and it is usually not ideal. Feature count is a poor metric to optimize against. Instead, ROI and delivered customer value should be the focus of product development investments.

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

#148

Post by chaoz_ »

dylan604 wrote: post #137
niwtsol wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Do you also inspect and study what assembly code your program was compiled to?

// Obviously LLMs are non-determenistic etc and it depends on your domain, but your VP's point 100% makes sense if you folks are trying to cook up another demo-CRUD apps to convince investors for another funding round

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

#149

Post by eska »

chaoz_ wrote: post #148
dylan604 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Do you also inspect and study what assembly code your program was compiled to? // Obviously LLMs are non-determenistic etc and it depends on your domain, but your VP's point 100% makes sense if you folks are trying to cook up another demo-CRUD apps to convince investors for another funding round

I keep hearing this argument on HN. Yes, if performance is something you care about you totally look at the disassembly. You don’t even need to write assembly, just be able to read it. By now I assume that programmers who argue they don’t need to understand and review what the LLM generates for them are simply not that skilled and don’t realize that skilled programmers do this.

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

#150

Post by eska »

LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #72
palmotea wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far where I work its the Instant Pot, at least for the non-devs. We rolled out Claude & Cowork to the masses after a brief pilot. It was about a solid month and a half of heavy usage and then suddenly usage fell off a cliff. Once it stopped being a cool new toy, people just didn't find a use for it. Your employer is doing it wrong. You need usage surveillance with sanctions for low/declining use, then people won…

Please tell me you're being sarcastic.

He’s referencing practices at Meta and probably others
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