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

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

#251

Post by CharlieDigital »

comfysocks wrote: post #249
CharlieDigital wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to offer a contrarian view here: First is that despite a lot of waste, some innovation will arise from an enterprising employee finding some interesting use case. A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases. Second is that many workers will be entrenched in their ways. If your executive goal is to achieve the above (find innovative…

Sure, indiscriminate tokenmaxxing is a gamble that can pay off sometimes. However, I think that the decision to take any gamble should be made by someone who will bear responsibility for the downside as well as the upside. I would prefer to search for new usages in a more strategic way. I agree that experimentation is a great way to learn if done intelligently and with limits. Full “Monte Carlo” makes sense when ops…

    >  I would prefer to search for new usages in a more strategic way
I think this is very, very hard for orgs to do.

Looking back at the Internet, who would have thought that it would eventually create a Netflix, Amazon, Shopify, Spotify, Google Maps, etc. Just wild the things that ended up coming out of pushing bits over a wire with few simple protocols.

In an ideal world, you make strategic bets, but I can also see the case for the opposite this early in the lifecycle of a technology. You just don't know until you try.

Mid/late 2023, it wasn't at all obvious that it would take over coding that fast.

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

#252

Post by port11 »

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

You mean… increasing AI budget has no direct relationship with productivity and therefore revenue? It’s not that simple? But… my TEDx talk and LinkedIn ramblings…

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

#253

Post by 99954bb63ccc »

ian_j_butler wrote: post #231
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…

> 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 constituen…

Wow, amazing answer! I have a lot of reading and then thinking to do, but if you are documenting your research anywhere, I'd greatly appreciate somewhere to follow it.

Thank you so much! This is why I love HN.

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

#256

Post by starkparker »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #109
SoftTalker wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide an example? What is different about running Uber services in Chicago vs. Indianapolis?

For example in Seattle you pay county fees, and then state fees, and then maybe special fees if you were picked up in the airport. I took a ride from SEATAC to my hotel in downtown Seattle and besides the ride itself, there were 5 other items on the bill, 4 of which are specific to the place I used Uber. Then I had the return trip from my hotel to SEATAC, on this one I got EIGHT items on the bill, on top of the ride…

> I also took Uber in India, where you have to share a one-time password with the driver for example, which I've never seen in any other country.

I was prompted for this on the US west coast this week. If that feature was ever India-only, I don't think it is now.

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

#257

Post by queenkjuul »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #251
comfysocks wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, indiscriminate tokenmaxxing is a gamble that can pay off sometimes. However, I think that the decision to take any gamble should be made by someone who will bear responsibility for the downside as well as the upside. I would prefer to search for new usages in a more strategic way. I agree that experimentation is a great way to learn if done intelligently and with limits. Full “Monte Carlo” makes sense when ops…

> I would prefer to search for new usages in a more strategic way I think this is very, very hard for orgs to do. Looking back at the Internet, who would have thought that it would eventually create a Netflix, Amazon, Shopify, Spotify, Google Maps, etc. Just wild the things that ended up coming out of pushing bits over a wire with few simple protocols. In an ideal world, you make strategic bets, but I can also see th…

People talked about streaming years before Netflix. Online maps apps date back to the 1990s. E-commerce as well.

I definitely get the impression that many people thought it would eventually create shopping, streaming, and mapping sites.

I think people were less likely to have predicted things like social media or YouTube, though those weren't ideas sprung from a vacuum either.

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

#258

Post by queenkjuul »

discreteevent wrote: post #225
CharlieDigital wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to offer a contrarian view here: First is that despite a lot of waste, some innovation will arise from an enterprising employee finding some interesting use case. A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases. Second is that many workers will be entrenched in their ways. If your executive goal is to achieve the above (find innovative…

> 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.

Seriously. No mandates at my company. In 2023 and 2024 i had access to Claude, but frankly it wasn't until 2025 that i found the models useful enough, now i use them every day. Nobody forced me. Had they forced me, I'd probably have quit. Once the tools were sufficiently mature and verifiably helpful, people like me all over the company naturally picked up the tools too.

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

#259

Post by queenkjuul »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #238
discreteevent wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And you think forcing blockbuster's software teams to use the Web would have changed that? You don't think they were using the web for all their corporate communications systems? I very much think they were, and getting blindsided by streaming had probably nothing to do with blockbuster's existing engineering teams not understanding the Internet. Their product teams didn't understand it, but they wouldn't be the ones being "forced to write webpages" either

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

#260

Post by roxolotl »

pmg101 wrote: post #246
roxolotl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inability of leaders to understand Goodhart’s Law is always a sight to behold. They see a number go up and pat themselves on the back for how well their employees are making it go up without ever wondering if the thing they care about is happening.

This is one explanation, sure. Isn't it more likely that they simply don't in fact care about the "thing they care about", only the metric? They can plot the metric on a chart and receive praise, so that's what they're interested in.

That’s an even worse characterization of them isn’t it? They don’t even care about the end result just the metric. That would take them from clueless to malicious.
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