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

Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 360 posts

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#231

Post by ian_j_butler »

99954bb63ccc wrote: post #108
izanton wrote: post #29

What if... we stop for a moment, and then, after thinking for a moment, we stop hammering nails with a microscope, and stop using token usage as a metric of productivity? I know it's sounds stupid, but what if

I feel like individually, if you sat down with literally any reasonable person on the planet they would arrive at and/or agree with the tenor here. I'd be curious to hear from people well versed in group psychology/dynamics and/or just a lot of leadership/people experience: what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point. Obviously nobody here is goi…

> what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point.

Large and fascinating topic I'm researching, very relevant for agentic AI and ML too. One way that groups can fail is that they just don't work to dampen / vote out individual errors properly (see PAC learning, Condorcet). Other kinds of errors only occur in groups, and can occur even when constituents individually aren't actually wrong. Some related stuff is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet's_jury_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_cascade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade

The last is probably the most relevant here and made worse by the negative effects of hierarchy. To quote one section:

> The negative effects of informational cascades sometimes become a legal concern and laws have been enacted to neutralize them. Ward Farnsworth, a law professor, analyzed the legal aspects of informational cascades and gave several examples in his book The Legal Analyst: in many military courts, the officers voting to decide a case vote in reverse rank order (the officer of the lowest rank votes first), and he suggested it may be done so the lower-ranked officers would not be tempted by the cascade to vote with the more senior officers, who are believed to have more accurate judgement;

For token-maxxing, our "senior officers" are just executives, and line workers aren't going to vote. Who is the senior officer for those senior officers? It's not shareholders! It's really the executives of even bigger companies, because that is the actually applicable promotion ladder. It's all kind of obvious, but also a genuinely better explanation than "monkey see monkey do". These are just the simpler things, and there's more gnarly dilemmas in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#232

Post by darkwater »

KaiserPro wrote: post #219
99954bb63ccc wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like individually, if you sat down with literally any reasonable person on the planet they would arrive at and/or agree with the tenor here. I'd be curious to hear from people well versed in group psychology/dynamics and/or just a lot of leadership/people experience: what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point. Obviously nobody here is goi…

we are going through our second AI transformation, the first one didn't work that well because the tools were shit. Whats happening now and whos driving it is interesting. The CEO has a license for this new tool (think one of the top 4, Qwen Claude, Gemini, openAI) and really likes it. So much so that they (non coder) are making lots of little single page web apps. The COO is bollocks deep in AI, and is saying that w…

Just...wow. That sounds awful, and I'm sorry for you, but I believe many other companies will or are already following that same path.

And myself being an infrastructure guy that needs to maintain all these PoCs that are now suddenly critical for production, it's the perfect nightmare.

And mind you, that dynamic always existed to a certain degree (laptop on a desk that runs some ugly Python script that does half the work of the BizOps team? Check. GCP account attached to the GSuite running a random instance for finance when the company is 101% on AWS? Check. Spreadsheet with macros that sends emails via Outlook as a mailing list manager? Check.) but at least when you discovered that you could scold them and tell them that we need to migrate this to a proper system because security. But nowadays with vibe-coded internal apps...it's a challenge.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#233

Post by discreteevent »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #230
discreteevent wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI So if the people who embrace AI areore successful then the others will follow. Just like every other new tech. Why does AI have to be forced? What's the hurry? Especially when there's no clear example of a company jumping ahead because of their use of it. It's idiots being driven by FUD. That's the reason.

> What's the hurry? There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition. There's also a need to quickly adopt and understand the technology; take the Internet for example. If we were talking about the Internet, forcing teams to build and publish web pages would be one valid way to get teams comfortable with the tech, the workflow, the shift in how to propagate and convey information to an audie…

I was programming desktop applications when the web came along. I don't remember anyone ever saying they had been mandated to program for it.

The web took off all by itself because it had a clear value proposition for some use cases.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#234

Post by archagon »

mrkeen wrote: post #68

I always used to wonder this about software stacks even prior to LLMs, but it seems more relevant now somehow: When will Uber (or your favourite company) be 'done'? They've been writing software for 16 years. They match drivers to passengers. More software isn't going to increase the chance that I seek them out instead of taking a bus or train. Will their software be finished in 20 years? 80?

It’s death for a tech company to be “done,” since that means no more growth. So they will all bloat indefinitely until they implode or get absorbed. It’s simply the fate of all VC-fueled startups.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#235

Post by shepherdjerred »

loeg wrote: post #196
KaiserPro wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, they also said that previous time off for ill health wasn't a reason either. but looking at the number of people who had taken leave, it suggests otherwise.

You can believe whatever conspiracy theories you want, of course, but the most straightforward explanation is that when you lay off X,000 or XX,000 people, some number of them will be on leave.

My understanding is that they must layoff some workers on leave, otherwise they would be discriminating

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#236

Post by nine_zeros »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #221
KaiserPro wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases. Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, and sure I have nothing really to show for it, but for those three months, we had a lot of food fights" Your manager then goes on to explain they not only need more money to cover the food budget, but a…

Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, but we invented this new dish and now our restaurant is the hottest in town. Sure 95% of the food was wasted but now we can stop the waste and keep the popular dish."

[dead]

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#238

Post by CharlieDigital »

discreteevent wrote: post #233
CharlieDigital wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the hurry? There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition. There's also a need to quickly adopt and understand the technology; take the Internet for example. If we were talking about the Internet, forcing teams to build and publish web pages would be one valid way to get teams comfortable with the tech, the workflow, the shift in how to propagate and convey information to an audie…

I was programming desktop applications when the web came along. I don't remember anyone ever saying they had been mandated to program for it. The web took off all by itself because it had a clear value proposition for some use cases.

    > The web took off all by itself because it had a clear value proposition for some use cases.
Many enterprises became legacy because of the web, many enterprises failed because they didn't understand the impact of the tech.

Sears was the OG Amazon. Imagine if Sears had seen it as the new digital catalog.

Blockbuster missed on streaming until it was too late.

Many, many legacy companies did not understand the web and did not understand the impact of the Internet to their business model.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#239

Post by Ekaros »

nickvec wrote: post #213
victor9000 wrote: post #129

Clearly they need more layoffs, and for that matter why keep anyone around? After all, AI will be writing 100% of code in 2026.

Surprisingly, Uber hasn’t had a mass layoff since 2020. The company currently has ~34,000 FTEs, which I personally think is insanely bloated for what amounts to a taxi + food delivery app.

No wonder they need to extract such a massive cut. I really have no hope we will ever get to efficient middle-men who take least they can for good of both sides beyond them.

Re: Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing

#240

Post by expedition32 »

devin wrote: post #110
treis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. These are the same people that force their employees to use Microsoft teams because slack is $5 an employee a month. They're not going to sit idly by while employees burn thousands a month in tokens.

It depends on which people you're referring to. The allocation toward AI budget has been so massive that I think a lot of businesses are way behind on trying to assess value for dollar for the AI-related crud they're shelling out for.

The next recession (and there's always a next recession) will clean up this AI bubble. The actually useful products and companies will make it the rest goes down.
Post reply on HN