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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

#41

Post by ajross »

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'd much rather hire a junior engineer who spends $100-$200/month

I'd much rather hire a junior engineer at $1.20/hour too! Can you hook me up with your contract services provider?

Obviously I know you're talking about AI costs only. But the idea of doing that analysis without looking at the salary of the person running the tool seems to be completely missing the point.

Now, sure, there are legitimate arguments to be made about efficacy and efficiency and sustainability and best practices. But, no, $100k/year absolutely doesn't need to be "justified" if it works. That's cheaper than the alternative, and markedly so.

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

#42

Post by dpark »

tcoff91 wrote: post #31
dpark wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The leaderboards are dumb, but I understand the point of telling people not to worry about tokens and just use it. They are trying to get people to try it, to discover new uses without asking “is this worth testing”. It’s basically early R&D budget. Eventually these companies will decide it’s time to transition into efficient usage.

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

#44

Post by boringg »

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…

Keep word doing A LOT of lifting “responsibly”

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

#45

Post by maxdo »

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…

In your fictional world you hire a junior who will write code manually, right?

First , I interview people, Junior skills in manual coding dropped sharply this year. These are people who started they school manual and switched mid-course. In two years there will be no such people.

well, that will never happened anymore in this world unless we will go back to caves, especially for juniors. Junior that writes good code is already a dying unicorn.

The outcome will be ... you will hire a junior ... who will burn more tokens, and chances of mistakes with less expensive model, less tokens are even higher.

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

#46

Post by AndrewKemendo »

This continues to boggle my mind so hopefully somebody can explain how this is happening.

I’ve been using all these tools since they started popping out around 2021 personally and professionally. I probably built four or five products at this point with assistance, not to mention the thousands and thousands of back-and-forth conversations for research or search or rubber ducking or whatever.

I have never spent more than whatever the professional max plan is that is consistently $20 a month.

I asked a friend of mine who spent a couple hundred dollars in like an few hours how they did it. The answer was they basically getting these agent groups of agents stuck in a loop and they’re constantly just generating verbose bullshit that is not even interrogated and doesn’t come out with any artifact that is inspectable no matter how expert you are.

The couple of stories I have heard of these massive crazy spends are people literally just assuming these things can complete an entire human task in one shot, so they continue to hit the “spin the wheel” button until they get something closer to what they want

But I’ve yet to see that actually work

and it actually flies in the face of every instruction guide or documentation or prompt engineering process that has been described over the last almost 5 years

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

#47

Post by maccard »

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…

There was a tool posted called codeburn that showed a breakdown of what activity your usage was spent on. Mine was almost all coding but other people in the thread said >50% of their usage was conversation. I’m inclined to agree with you that someone who is reasonable with their compute usage is likely to be thinking things through rather than just burning tokens to get an LLM to solve the problem

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

#48

Post by arcanemachiner »

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?

To answer your second question: Yes, much of it is worse than useless. The tools need guidance to produce useful output. If you use it poorly, you will get garbage output that may do more harm than good.

And your response does not address the point being made in the comment you replied to: Many people are being evaluated by how many tokens they burn, which is about as good a metric as lines of code written.

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

#49

Post by mkozlows »

ninjagoo wrote: post #37

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…

Everything in this article is purely fake. The numbers don't add up, don't match any reported info, and are just fiction.

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

#50

Post by txru »

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?

Goodhart's Law isn't a problem immediately. If you want more code to be written, and the only feasible way to write it to goals is to heavily use AI, then you might run into the problems of AI-generated code, and an infrastructure that's poorly architected and much less understood than it would've been ten years ago.
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