Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#291

Post by athrowaway3z » Fri, May 01, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

drfloyd51 wrote: post #206

abuani wrote: post #17

I take a peak every month or so at spend for my company and notice more and more are consumed $1k in tokens a month and it is bewildering to me how. I use llms daily, and see anywhere from $200-$400 tops. This is using the most expensive models, in deep thinking mode. So I'm not a Luddite against the usage of them. I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. I genuinely challenge someon…

Your estimates do not account for speed of delivery. If an AI can deliver 10x faster, the target is less than 10x a dev salary. But 10x faster also gets you to market sooner. Which has value.

I could argue in all the ways my personal experience disagree, but lets just Occam's razor:

Most people agree big orgs regularly have dysfunctional incentives. We've seen it happen a thousand times.

Your suggestion requires we also assume a 10x faster delivery time by people spending 200$ vs 1000$ - something I've yet to witness or hear a credible account of.

So while that might be true in a small number of cases, in general its foolish to go with the "10x delivery speed" hypothesis.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#292

Post by hn111 » Fri, May 01, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

Galanwe wrote: post #278

abuani wrote: post #17

I take a peak every month or so at spend for my company and notice more and more are consumed $1k in tokens a month and it is bewildering to me how. I use llms daily, and see anywhere from $200-$400 tops. This is using the most expensive models, in deep thinking mode. So I'm not a Luddite against the usage of them. I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. I genuinely challenge someon…

> I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. From my experience, this happens essentially by three means: - Level 0 (beginner users) long lived conversations: If you dont get in the habit of compressing, or otherwise manually forcing the model to summarize/checkpoint its work, you will often find people perpetually reusing the same conversation. This is especially true for _beginners_,…

Where is level 2?

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#293

Post by hparadiz » Fri, May 01, 2026, 6:27 PM UTC

abuani wrote: post #17

I take a peak every month or so at spend for my company and notice more and more are consumed $1k in tokens a month and it is bewildering to me how. I use llms daily, and see anywhere from $200-$400 tops. This is using the most expensive models, in deep thinking mode. So I'm not a Luddite against the usage of them. I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. I genuinely challenge someon…

Multimedia feedback can burn much more than that. If I'm sending frames of 3D engine's output. I mean I would like to send it a video if I could but that is too expensive but I'm sure there's orgs out there that really do want every frame in a prompt doing something. This can be exponential depending on the application. I recently wrote a Milkdrop visualization analyzer. I could have sent thousands of frames for each one. I didn't but well I wish I could haha.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#294

Post by linkregister » Fri, May 01, 2026, 6:27 PM UTC

ageitgey wrote: post #13

woah wrote: post #5

It's very easy to blow through hundreds of dollars a session using API tokens especially with the 1m context if you aren't careful about clearing old context. At the same time the subscription will allow the same usage for hundreds of dollars a month. Either Anthropic is absolutely hosing API users, massively subsidizing subscriptions, or a little bit of both.

Anthropic has a very "interesting" business model where you get subscription pricing as long as you are under 150 employees. When you hit 151, you have to start paying API prices overnight for everyone, and your total bill instantly multiplies. They are getting you hooked on cheaper tokens, then raking you in when you get scale. I'm sure Uber gets a break on list price, but I doubt they are anywhere near <150 employe…

Is that known to be true? Enterprise pricing is opaque. I am aware of at least one 151+ organization using a flat-cost $150-200/mo per seat Claude Premium contract. Reportedly most employees don't need to top up with additional API usage to cope with token limits.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#295

Post by ori_b » Fri, May 01, 2026, 6:28 PM UTC

abuani wrote: post #17

I take a peak every month or so at spend for my company and notice more and more are consumed $1k in tokens a month and it is bewildering to me how. I use llms daily, and see anywhere from $200-$400 tops. This is using the most expensive models, in deep thinking mode. So I'm not a Luddite against the usage of them. I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. I genuinely challenge someon…

If Uber is like most other companies, there's a leaderboard for AI tokens consumed. If maximizing your token usage is going to get you to the top of the leaderboard, and therefore promoted for "productivity", people are going to find creative ways to be "productive".

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#296

Post by MrDarcy » Fri, May 01, 2026, 6:28 PM UTC

abuani wrote: post #17

I take a peak every month or so at spend for my company and notice more and more are consumed $1k in tokens a month and it is bewildering to me how. I use llms daily, and see anywhere from $200-$400 tops. This is using the most expensive models, in deep thinking mode. So I'm not a Luddite against the usage of them. I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. I genuinely challenge someon…

It turns into 50k to 100k or more of value for the employee the moment upper management made AI spend a personal performance target across most corporations.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#297

Post by ori_b » Fri, May 01, 2026, 6:28 PM UTC

hn111 wrote: post #292

Galanwe wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. From my experience, this happens essentially by three means: - Level 0 (beginner users) long lived conversations: If you dont get in the habit of compressing, or otherwise manually forcing the model to summarize/checkpoint its work, you will often find people perpetually reusing the same conversation. This is especially true for _beginners_,…

Where is level 2?

LLMs can't count well.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#298

Post by floren » Fri, May 01, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

hn111 wrote: post #292

Galanwe wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. From my experience, this happens essentially by three means: - Level 0 (beginner users) long lived conversations: If you dont get in the habit of compressing, or otherwise manually forcing the model to summarize/checkpoint its work, you will often find people perpetually reusing the same conversation. This is especially true for _beginners_,…

Where is level 2?

Still waiting for the output of that agent

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#299

Post by steveBK123 » Fri, May 01, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

solenoid0937 wrote: post #287

steveBK123 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go look up a multi-year chart of their revenue and find the inflection point where the AI made it go up faster (there isn't). In fact revenue growth used to be higher pre-2023.

They were also a lot smaller pre-2023, 33% growth for a company of their size is simply insane. It is entirely likely that 33% simply wouldn't have happened without AI.

Motivated reasoning

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#300

Post by ori_b » Fri, May 01, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

quikoa wrote: post #285

hirako2000 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make 500k and aren't spending 250k in token, you should get fired.

I can't even tell whether this comment is serious or not.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jensen-huang-500k-engineers-...