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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

#331

Post by jmcqk6 »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #286
joshuastuden wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can that be attributed to any code an LLM wrote? >$8 billion of net income was the result of a tax benefit the company realized in the first quarter of the year. So exactly how much of their revenue is because of any code LLMs wrote vs. just structural tail winds?

You can always say "it's not because of LLMs", that's nearly unfalsifiable. But if all of your peers are saying LLMs are more productive, if you're building things faster than ever before, the macro picture speaks for itself.

It sounds like this has a pretty falsifiable claim here - is the revenue attributed to a tax thing? Then it's clearly not attributable to code.

I agree that the macro picture would speak for itself. Can you point to any macro level detail that is indeed cleanly showing benefits from increased productivity from LLMs?

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

#332

Post by ethin »

scuff3d wrote: post #288
joshuastuden wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can that be attributed to any code an LLM wrote? >$8 billion of net income was the result of a tax benefit the company realized in the first quarter of the year. So exactly how much of their revenue is because of any code LLMs wrote vs. just structural tail winds?

I agree that you can't draw any conclusions about AI, but their revenue increased by 33% percent. That's just straight income before any taxes or costs are applied.

Yes, but that doesn't mean AI increased their revenue. Is there definitive proof that AI/LLMs caused this increase?

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

#333

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

danaw wrote: post #34
KolmogorovComp wrote: post #12

Honest question, does Uber need that much R&D? And do they expect the ROI to be positive?

i assume this also includes their self driving vehicle research and trucking, not just their consumer mobile app dev

Uber cancelled their self-driving research years ago.

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

#334

Post by maherbeg »

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 also don't think a lot of people know some of the more advanced context management tricks like /rewind /fork /tree to take advantage of prefix caching

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

#335

Post by dinobones »

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…

Don't underestimate corporate waste. If it's not someone's job to care for something, they really won't.

Even before this AI wave, it was common for me to see spinning dev environments for like $3k/month that hadn't been used in months on AWS.

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

#336

Post by beering »

fragmede wrote: post #139
embedding-shape wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you tried to use the APIs to achieve the same thing, you would be spending thousands upon thousands of dollars a month. Yeah, obviously, not sure why anyone would be using APIs at this point, seems bananas to spend more than 10 EUR per day when these "almost-endless" subscriptions exists. > My completely unfounded conjecture is that OpenAI is trying to grab developers back from Claude by burning $$$$. Unlikely,…

> miles and leagues ahead of Claude Code, pretty much from inception. Can codex run background tasks yet? CC's ability to run a process in the background and monitor its output for errors while another process access that first process, is probably what got cc so popular for web development over codex to start with.

Yes, codex has had this ability for a while.

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

#337

Post by bakies »

jackp96 wrote: post #16
internetter wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/03/05/cursor-goes... "Cursor estimated last year that a $200-per-month Claude Code subscription could use up to $2,000 in compute, suggesting significant subsidization by Anthropic. Today, that subsidization appears to be even more aggressive, with that $200 plan able to consume about $5,000 in compute"

Really curious how many people actually get close to that level of usage? Their general business plan only offers the $100 version, with pay-as-you-go above that. If 95% of people are using $100 of value a month, the whales may not be hurting them that badly.

I wrote my own "harness" and it exposes the api dollar cost since those come back in the responses even while using my sub. The conversations are typically $40-$60 and the longs ones with multiple compactions get to $100+

I say "Harness" because it's just a web interface that uses `cluade -p` so I can run it in containers and remotely access it.

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

#338

Post by adamnemecek »

hyperbovine wrote: post #310
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_,…

> Just genuinely having 10 worktrees perpetually in parallel and cycling between them in between agent responses. Again, not necessarily bad in itself, but can exponentially conse credits. I'm pretty sure that growth is linear.

I think that you send the entire conversation with every request.

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

#339

Post by KaiserPro »

trjordan wrote: post #125

> figuring out if the company can afford this level of productivity at scale This is the thing that boggles my mind. They spent their budget. They have 4 months of data. What do they have to show for it? I'm not a hater; I'm not a luddite. I have a $200 Max plan and I use it. But are you saying that Uber made this tool available, urged everybody to use it, and is confused about what happens when it worked? It's one t…

What I don't understand is there are really good controls for spend, why on earth didn't they put caps on?

Or ask engineers to justify the spend?

Why should we spend that many tokens, what will that get us in return?

If this was AWS we'd all be pointing and going "Ahhhh you twats, didn't you look at your monthly spend?"

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

#340

Post by layer8 »

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?

It’s probably unary interpreted as binary, hence there is no level 2. Level 3 is followed by level 7. Level n is followed by level 2n + 1. Exponential growth. The singularity is near.
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