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Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

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Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#41

Post by rtkwe »

joenot443 wrote: post #30
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #21

What has been the end result of all the tokens companies are burning? Where does it show up in quarterly results? I can’t see how it’s sustainable just based on “this feels more productive”

A friend of mine added some pretty extensive iOS UI tests to a keystone feature hit by millions every month. They'd been kicking the can down the road for years, trying to fit it in their roadmap, and with Claude running overnight they were able to bang out the whole suite in a week. I'm not sure how it would show up in quarterly results.

In my limited experience with using agents to create tests it tends to code the tests to the existing code instead of ensuring the correctness from a spec. Great for regression testing but still limited in effectiveness for catching existing issues.

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#42

Post by tayo42 »

kshri24 wrote: post #3

I still get picked up by an Uber the same way. As an end user, nothing has changed for me. So I wonder what the heck were all those billions of AI tokens burnt on that they extinguished it in just 4 months into the year?

There's probably tons of backend projects going on, expanding in countries, payments, complying with regulations, effeciency and reliability projects. They also do food delivery. There's a whole engineering team to support

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#43

Post by levkk »

joenot443 wrote: post #30
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #21

What has been the end result of all the tokens companies are burning? Where does it show up in quarterly results? I can’t see how it’s sustainable just based on “this feels more productive”

A friend of mine added some pretty extensive iOS UI tests to a keystone feature hit by millions every month. They'd been kicking the can down the road for years, trying to fit it in their roadmap, and with Claude running overnight they were able to bang out the whole suite in a week. I'm not sure how it would show up in quarterly results.

It wouldn't, at least not directly. That's why it wasn't done pre-AI.

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#44

Post by louiereederson »

Anthropic's annualized run rate is >$40b according to outside reporting. AWS hit that by Q4 2019. There were still debates on public cloud vs on prem at that time, but by late 2019 public cloud had facilitated the creation or adoption of entire categories of software within SaaS and PaaS, not to mention consumer internet businesses like Uber and Airbnb. The net impact of AI coding tools is far more ambiguous in comparison.

The profitability comparison is fraught but worth noting that by then AWS was already extremely profitable.

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#45

Post by infecto »

nlawalker wrote: post #29

I never took tokenmaxxing to be about improving productivity directly; mundane feature work that comes out of it is just a side effect. I always saw it as a race between these big tech companies to get a generational advantage by being the one to discover the way of the future , with respect to harnessing AI to actually and truly automate software development. EDIT: whoa, I used "way of the future" as a reference to…

Agree and I have wondered behind close doors if this is not the mental model. You need to spend money to see what is working this was simply a way to see that.

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#46

Post by JSR_FDED »

smelendez wrote: post #40
joenot443 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine added some pretty extensive iOS UI tests to a keystone feature hit by millions every month. They'd been kicking the can down the road for years, trying to fit it in their roadmap, and with Claude running overnight they were able to bang out the whole suite in a week. I'm not sure how it would show up in quarterly results.

I see these kinds of stories here a lot, and I'm curious whether they reflect a steady stream of need for AI coding, or whether a lot of companies have a burst of AI-appropriate coding work now that the technology is available and then will have a smaller need going forward. Is it like the stereotypical dad who rents a power washer, powerwashes every exposed surface on his property, and then doesn't need to do any po…

That’s been my theory - there’s some low hanging fruit in every environment where AI knocks it out of the park. Then complex brownfield reality (coupled with non-technical factors) rears its head and the stunning productivity gains are nowhere near to be seen.

That’s the explanation how you can have both the anecdotes of amazing AI productivity and rigorous studies showing anything from actual loss of productivity to single-digit gains.

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#47

Post by datadrivenangel »

kllrnohj wrote: post #34
dwa3592 wrote: post #31

I am not sure how uber is operating internally around the use of tokens but if they actually shipped features faster than before then it is still a win. if they learn that users don't want these features or want a different version of it; they have learned this new knowledge faster than they would have if they manually coded those features, which means in principle you should be able to iterate faster. but this will…

I used Uber for the first time in like 8 years recently, and near as I can tell it's the exact same thing it was. What features are they even adding at all much less that anyone cares about? You ask for a ride to a place, a driver shows up, money is exchanged - the end? Sometimes things are actually just finished. They don't need to treadmill.

They have to make it easier for ubereats orders to have parts of their bill attached to a corporate card and half attached to someone's personal card and be able to split the invoices!

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#48

Post by lazide »

nlawalker wrote: post #29

I never took tokenmaxxing to be about improving productivity directly; mundane feature work that comes out of it is just a side effect. I always saw it as a race between these big tech companies to get a generational advantage by being the one to discover the way of the future , with respect to harnessing AI to actually and truly automate software development. EDIT: whoa, I used "way of the future" as a reference to…

Eh, I also saw it as a rather blatant attempt to undermine the bargaining power of the Software Engineer (which had grown to insane proportions over the years) - both in working conditions and raw cash money.

In many cases it really didn’t/doesn’t matter if the AI automation actually works, just that people think it could - and hence leave money on the table.

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#49

Post by thewebguyd »

smelendez wrote: post #40
joenot443 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine added some pretty extensive iOS UI tests to a keystone feature hit by millions every month. They'd been kicking the can down the road for years, trying to fit it in their roadmap, and with Claude running overnight they were able to bang out the whole suite in a week. I'm not sure how it would show up in quarterly results.

I see these kinds of stories here a lot, and I'm curious whether they reflect a steady stream of need for AI coding, or whether a lot of companies have a burst of AI-appropriate coding work now that the technology is available and then will have a smaller need going forward. Is it like the stereotypical dad who rents a power washer, powerwashes every exposed surface on his property, and then doesn't need to do any po…

So far where I work its the Instant Pot, at least for the non-devs. We rolled out Claude & Cowork to the masses after a brief pilot. It was about a solid month and a half of heavy usage and then suddenly usage fell off a cliff. Once it stopped being a cool new toy, people just didn't find a use for it.

A few mundane things got automated, but these were just back office admin type work. Nothing that's going to show on the P&L. Yeah those people now have a little more time for other things, but those other things are also not revenue generating. No FTE got replaced by it so in the end they just paid for a bunch of administrative positions to be a little less busy. Great for the workers who are now less stressed, but almost no impact on the business financials except there's now yet another subscription.

Re: Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

#50

Post by mattnelson »

Legend2440 wrote: post #39
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #21

What has been the end result of all the tokens companies are burning? Where does it show up in quarterly results? I can’t see how it’s sustainable just based on “this feels more productive”

Even if Uber really did double developer productivity, would it translate to quarterly results? Ultimately they make money selling rides, not selling software. The Uber app is mature and adding new features is unlikely to significantly increase sales. Writing 2x more code doesn't translate to 2x more revenue unless it results in 2x more rides.

Lowering costs to run the infra would show up as increased profits without any change in rides.
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