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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'

#151

Post by dangus »

pjmlp wrote: post #12
dangus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don’t understand on the customer side of B2B why so many companies actively encouraged AI tooling costs. I can understand it from the side of the companies selling tokens and AI hardware. I don’t understand the race to spend more on internal tools. I’ve been sitting around waiting for my company to buy a number of necessary bits of tools. They cheap out on every solution imaginable. Datadog is too expensive,…

I surely remember everyone does SOA, everyone does NoSQL, everyone does Hadoop, everyone does microservices, everyone does kubernetes,.... Not with the same pressure as everyone in the company (literally everyone, regardless of the job role) has to burn AI tokens, and attend forced AI workshops, still it is always running after the next new shinny.

I think most of the previous trends were less widespread and some of them (like kubernetes[1]) are sensible default options.

We are seeing shoe companies pivot to AI. They didn’t do that with Hadoop or NoSQL.

[1] Even some homelab folks sometimes go straight to kubernetes even though it’s technically overkill.

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

#152

Post by jurgenburgen »

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.

By that logic shouldn’t streaming video games also be centralized?

Yet startups keep trying it and failing. Turns out users actually want exclusive access to that hardware to have a smooth experience. The tradeoff has always been between faster exclusive hardware or slower but cheaper shared hardware.

If local hardware can’t beat shared hardware on performance then something’s wrong? Either it’s because the providers are charging wildly below cost or because local hardware just hasn’t needed to catch up. Maybe it’s both.

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

#154

Post by alfiedotwtf »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #152
charcircuit wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By that logic shouldn’t streaming video games also be centralized? Yet startups keep trying it and failing. Turns out users actually want exclusive access to that hardware to have a smooth experience. The tradeoff has always been between faster exclusive hardware or slower but cheaper shared hardware. If local hardware can’t beat shared hardware on performance then something’s wrong? Either it’s because the providers…

RAMageddon has caused local models to lag far behind hardware for a long while now.

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

#155

Post by alfiedotwtf »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #144
niwtsol wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

!RemindMe 2 years

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

#156

Post by chaoz_ »

eska wrote: post #149
chaoz_ wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're just building a non-security-sensitive frontend to validate market traction, it makes total sense to go full AI. The commenter working at a 10-person company getting flamed for not using AI to iterate aggresively against competitors has a super valid point.

Validation methods will evolve to accommodate human laziness. Insisting on doing it the hard way is no different than the old-timers who used to claim engineers 'weren't skilled' if they didn't know how to use punch cards.

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

#157

Post by Izkata »

bluGill wrote: post #131
y0eswddl wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Roborock has already released a vacuum that does this. From what I've seen it's limited, but it seems to work for the things it can pick up.

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

#158

Post by alfiedotwtf »

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.

”AI models will replace software developed in 6 months”

— CEO of Anthropic, the employer of over 2000 developers, over 6 months ago

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

#159

Post by eska »

chaoz_ wrote: post #156
eska wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're just building a non-security-sensitive frontend to validate market traction, it makes total sense to go full AI. The commenter working at a 10-person company getting flamed for not using AI to iterate aggresively against competitors has a super valid point. Validation methods will evolve to accommodate human laziness. Insisting on doing it the hard way is no different than the old-timers who used to claim e…

Ad hominem. Skilled programmers != old-timers calling others unskilled. Who does fuzz testing, automated integration tests, etc already, that LLMs need as a test harness? It’s not the vibe coders saying “nobody reads assembly anyway” as an argument.

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

#160

Post by chaoz_ »

eska wrote: post #159
chaoz_ wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're just building a non-security-sensitive frontend to validate market traction, it makes total sense to go full AI. The commenter working at a 10-person company getting flamed for not using AI to iterate aggresively against competitors has a super valid point. Validation methods will evolve to accommodate human laziness. Insisting on doing it the hard way is no different than the old-timers who used to claim e…

Ad hominem. Skilled programmers != old-timers calling others unskilled. Who does fuzz testing, automated integration tests, etc already, that LLMs need as a test harness? It’s not the vibe coders saying “nobody reads assembly anyway” as an argument.

I simplified this argument to highlight that we’ve seen this exact pattern before.
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