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Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

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

#31

Post by tcoff91 »

dpark wrote: post #25
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…

> responsibly There’s your problem. You’re trying to be responsible instead of trying to burn tokens so you can have your name on top of some leaderboard for most wasteful AI users.

The perverse incentives created by these AI leaderboards are crazy.

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

#32

Post by wolttam »

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 out writing good prompts helps to keep token usage down as the model wastes fewer tokens discovering context it needs that wasn't hinted at in the prompt.

Whereas a good prompt will give solid leads to all the specifics needed to complete the task.

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

#33

Post by brightball »

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.

I evaluated the pricing and could not justify the jump to Enterprise from Team. You lose the monthly subscription entirely when you jump to enterprise so you lose your ability to control costs.

You can cap per user, but not having the rolling cap are you really just going to tell a member of your team “No AI for the rest of the month”

It’s a risky deal as it sets up now IMO.

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

#35

Post by dpark »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #22
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…

They keep forgetting to put "make no mistakes", "think deeply" and "get it right the first time" in their prompts. When people have no ability to understand what they are doing, they will just rerun it endlessly hoping they get something passable. When that doesn't happen they burn money.

I doubt most of this is from rerunning the same prompts over and over. This token burn is more likely from people using swarms of agents and orchestrators for “efficiency”.

“I’ve got 2 dozen agents churning through the backlog to build this feature that would take one agent an hour to implement.”

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

#36

Post by RHSeeger »

Sherveen wrote: post #18
MichaelNolan wrote: post #3

> 95% of Uber engineers now use AI tools monthly with 70% of committed code originating from AI. Well, that’s to be expected when using AI tools becomes relevant in your performance evaluation.

I don't understand this critique. (1) Did you previously think you weren't getting paid for doing what a company wants you to do, aka what THEY thought was productive? (2) Do you think all this AI generated code is useless? Edit: y'all are some whiney folk, ain't ya?

I think the point was that, when you make a metric goal of "you must use AI this much", then people will use AI even in ways that isn't adding to productivity.

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

#37

Post by ninjagoo »

According to [1], there are about 5500 people in Engineering at Uber. Using $1250 as the mid-point of the $ spend range, that comes to about $6.8 Million in engineering AI spend, ballpark, with the range being $2.75 Million - $12 Million. The article lists $3.4 Billion as the R&D spend.

The AI spend does not appear to be a significant chunk of R&D spending (0.3% in 4 months or 1% annualized). If they didn't plan for it, sure, it's not peanuts in the budget, but in context not that much.

The real question is, what did they get for that amount? The article claims that 70% of the code commit is now AI-generated, so presumably the code passed review and tests. Did it accelerate the feature count? did it reduce quality problems? Did it lead to other benefits?

Sadly the article is silent on the outcomes, besides the higher spend.

Maybe 4 months is too soon to assess the benefits. On the other hand, in an agile world ...

[1] https://www.unifygtm.com/insights-headcount/uber

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

#38

Post by jp57 »

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…

Claude is a mediocre programmer that can do great things with great supervision, but it can't make mediocre human programmers into good ones, because they can't provide great supervision.

It will try and try and try, though.

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

#39

Post by bobsomers »

Sherveen wrote: post #18
MichaelNolan wrote: post #3

> 95% of Uber engineers now use AI tools monthly with 70% of committed code originating from AI. Well, that’s to be expected when using AI tools becomes relevant in your performance evaluation.

I don't understand this critique. (1) Did you previously think you weren't getting paid for doing what a company wants you to do, aka what THEY thought was productive? (2) Do you think all this AI generated code is useless? Edit: y'all are some whiney folk, ain't ya?

Not OP, but:

1. At my level, the company is not just paying me to do a task the way they want it done, they are paying for my experience to orchestrate the best way to do it. They want an outcome, and I'm responsible for figuring out how to get to that outcome with the right balance of cost, correctness, etc. But yes, the most dystopian reality is what you said.

2. It's not useless, but the AI generated code is absolutely lower quality than what I would have written myself, but there is no desire to clean it up. Companies have always had a disastrously bad understanding of technical debt and they finally have tool they can shove down developers throats that trades even more velocity for even less quality. They're going to take that trade every single time.

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

#40

Post by rogerrogerr »

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…

Strange pricing model for a company selling the idea of having fewer employees.
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