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Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

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Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#31

Post by sunshowers »

andyferris wrote: post #10

I’m confused why a business would allow (non-data-science/agent harness devs) to pay per token instead of eg an Anthropic business premium seat? A monthly subscription seems pretty straight forward for the accountants, no?

At this point the subsidized rates are only available with individual plans. In principle your workplace can pay for an individual plan for you, but for compliance reasons that is likely only feasible at smaller places that are primarily open source oriented (so there's little risk of proprietary code leaking).

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#33

Post by minimaxir »

cletus wrote: post #24

If I were the CTO of any of these companies I would be working my butt off to be making an internal version of Claude. Let me explain my reasoning using Google as an example (disclaimer: Xoogler). Google has a lot of systems to make a very large monorepo manageable so builds and code search don't take forever. The build system is Blaze (on which Bazel is based), which has a Pythonic syntax and was once Python but tha…

The costs of a) selfhosting a >100B param LLM model b) scaling it to a full company and c) maintaining it are all significant risky investments that is even more expensive in the short term.

Those are generally the core reasons most SaaSes exists. Additionally, (a) is the biggest issue because there is no open-weights model that can match GPT 5.5/Opus 4.8.

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#34

Post by lijok »

cletus wrote: post #24

If I were the CTO of any of these companies I would be working my butt off to be making an internal version of Claude. Let me explain my reasoning using Google as an example (disclaimer: Xoogler). Google has a lot of systems to make a very large monorepo manageable so builds and code search don't take forever. The build system is Blaze (on which Bazel is based), which has a Pythonic syntax and was once Python but tha…

Are you describing finetuning?

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#35

Post by jaggederest »

nate wrote: post #8

It's funny the convos I now have with Sonnet that I wasn't having with Opus. I feel like most of us here are starting to be told to draw down some of our 1M Opus xtrahigh thinking tokens :) Is anyone using a local router to deal with that? Something thats like "don't even bother with sonnet for this task, just go with Opus". I wonder if Haiku could even do that math and recommend the model you should be in?

my task workflow uses something like opus to evaluate the roadmap, sonnet to divide the tickets by complexity, and then dispatch them to the relevant models - I use haiku or openai's spark models (spark is FAST! and DUMB!) for the simplest, and ascending in complexity. I find mid tier sonnet and gpt5 are pretty competitive, and reserve opus for truly "rearchitect the app from scratch" style tasks.

But all that might be somewhat obsolete, the latest update for claude code looks like it uses workflows with various models, so they might already be optimizing that.

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#36

Post by zoogeny »

This is a contrarian view and I am a biased AI-maximalist. But I actually think these kinds of results are genuinely important.

There is a lot of frustration and even anger over CEOs pushing AI onto employees and some schadenfreude when it goes wrong. But there is some element of "fail fast" happening here.

I am glad wealthy corporations are footing the bill by stretching this technology to its limit. The fact of the matter is, we don't know how effective the best-of-the-best models are at scale.

There is a feeling that once we figure out how to leverage these agents, we'll see explosive growth. It's just going to cost a lot of money figuring it out.

It seems that for now, handing over 100% of code writing to LLMs is going to be too expensive. Cost per token for equivalent code is too high.

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#37

Post by radiator »

glimshe wrote: post #26

We're going to see a 180 degree turnaround and a new metric soon: the less you spend, the better your yearly review. Going above quota will require syncs, forms, manager and VP approval etc.

That used to be the normality. You want to spend company money, you need to justify it.

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#38

Post by bijowo1676 »

__natty__ wrote: post #27

Maybe one day companies will optimize AI costs by hiring people?

pretty sure ChatGPT tokens should be cheaper than the CEO pay (Uber's CEO pay is $36,000,000+)

I don't understand why CEO doesn't optimize and automate himself out of the job, like the software engineers are told to do

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#39

Post by prymitive »

socketcluster wrote: post #4

It makes me wonder about the state of their codebase if devs needs to consume more than $1500 per month. It's interesting that AI is finally forcing businesses to think about coding maintenance costs though. When I started working on https://saasufy.com/ as a dev tool many years ago, I was frustrated that no big company cared about software maintenance costs and I really couldn't imagine a world where maintenance cos…

I have no idea how much I’ve spent, it’s invisible to me, the company doesn’t share it with me. I have no idea what “1 credit” means in terms of $$$, is that 1$? 0.1? 0.01? Is it even a fixed price? I have no idea how much will given take cost. Well, I can ask for a plan and extrapolate from that, but all perfectly reasonable looking plans eventually end up in a rabbit hole. Providers keep introducing new models and each is more expensive while offering modest improvements, it’s a silent inflation.

So I personally can easily believe that. Especially that a lot of people will just try to see if model can make that huge improvement / refactoring they’ve been hoping to do a reality, or tons of experiments to validate ideas.

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#40

Post by josefritzishere »

zoogeny wrote: post #36

This is a contrarian view and I am a biased AI-maximalist. But I actually think these kinds of results are genuinely important. There is a lot of frustration and even anger over CEOs pushing AI onto employees and some schadenfreude when it goes wrong. But there is some element of "fail fast" happening here. I am glad wealthy corporations are footing the bill by stretching this technology to its limit. The fact of the…

I have a feeling it's not going to be magic and will obey the laws of Supply and Demand like all other tech products; further that it's hugely over valued and is going to crash like a meteor before it's over. But we'll all find out together, right?
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