What has been the end result of all the tokens companies are burning?
Where does it show up in quarterly results?
I can’t see how it’s sustainable just based on “this feels more productive”
Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
21–30 of 167 posts
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently: * In App Hotel bookings in partnership with Expedia. * Travel Mode with suggestions on where to eat and visit when travelling. * Eats for the way - your driver picks up a takeaway for you to eat while they drive you to your destination. * Voice bookings using AI and speech to text. How did we ever live without them!
> Eats for the way - your driver picks up a takeaway for you to eat while they drive you to your destination. This seems like the kind of terrible idea that an LLM might have come up with. I'm pretty sure most drivers do not want people eating (especially a whole meal) in their car, and I can't imagine a lot of instances where you're calling an Uber and don't have time to get yourself food, but don't mind waiting an…
Not to mention what anyone who's worked in an office with a shared kitchen can tell you - the smell getting into a car where an indeterminate amount of people have eaten different meals. Like climbing into a food court dumpster.
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#23What has been the end result of all the tokens companies are burning? Where does it show up in quarterly results? I can’t see how it’s sustainable just based on “this feels more productive”
Advancement in AI research seems to be the only thing at this point.
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#24I still get picked up by an Uber the same way. As an end user, nothing has changed for me. So I wonder what the heck were all those billions of AI tokens burnt on that they extinguished it in just 4 months into the year?
Apparently: * In App Hotel bookings in partnership with Expedia. * Travel Mode with suggestions on where to eat and visit when travelling. * Eats for the way - your driver picks up a takeaway for you to eat while they drive you to your destination. * Voice bookings using AI and speech to text. How did we ever live without them!
For context, this is an interview where Uber CEO discussed these ideas:
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/922909/dara-khosrowshahi-ub...
Can't say I am convinced.
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#25Earlier 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,…
The logic is quite simple. Management thinks that AI can improve productivity, but knows that there will be some resistance and some learning curve. So they force people to use it so that people can 1. develop their skills and workflow and 2. find out where it is useful 3. find out what needs to be improved to make it useful. As a more obvious example consider that cars were just invented and the post office manageme…
How will companies like Uber continue to fund the “research” when the budget ends up burning 3x faster than predicted without being able to observe measurable gains?
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#26Earlier 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,…
The logic is quite simple. Management thinks that AI can improve productivity, but knows that there will be some resistance and some learning curve. So they force people to use it so that people can 1. develop their skills and workflow and 2. find out where it is useful 3. find out what needs to be improved to make it useful. As a more obvious example consider that cars were just invented and the post office manageme…
IMO, the root of all of this is the almost total inability for most managers, and most eng orgs to measure individual engineer output in any useful way. And in particular in a way that lets you reliably compare engineers to each other.
Despite decades of the industry telling itself that we "pay for performance" or whatever, that has never been the case because we can't really measure performance very well. Where I have seen it done ok (not great, just ok), it was massively labor intensive and did not last, and was only done fully when considering promotion.
So, as you observe, now we have some new technique that managers are sure will increase performance by 50+%, if only people would use it. They can't just raise their expectations of performance by 50%, because they can't measure performance to within 50%! So, they measure the thing they can: token consumption.
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#27What has been the end result of all the tokens companies are burning? Where does it show up in quarterly results? I can’t see how it’s sustainable just based on “this feels more productive”
> Where does it show up in quarterly results?
Standard answer is "companies that are not seeing significant gains from AI just aren't AI-ing hard enough, trust me bro".
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#28What has been the end result of all the tokens companies are burning? Where does it show up in quarterly results? I can’t see how it’s sustainable just based on “this feels more productive”
In the big red number shown after revenue where profits used to be.
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#29I 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 Howard Hughes in "The Aviator", not this Way of the Future religious organization thing I just stumbled on; no intended reference there.
Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
#30What has been the end result of all the tokens companies are burning? Where does it show up in quarterly results? I can’t see how it’s sustainable just based on “this feels more productive”
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.