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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'

#61

Post by thewebguyd »

Aurornis wrote: post #32
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?

This argument is funny because you could have said the same thing 4 years ago: Uber still picks you up just as it did years before that, so what did all those millions spent on developer salaries get them? Uber’s business is relentlessly confusing for people who think it’s a simple app to send an alert to a nearby driver to pick you up. Uber operates at a scale where there are no trivial problems because even small c…

Uber also has to maintain thousands of region specific rules and features to be able to operate globally, and they do it all in the same app instead of having specific regional versions (which would be a terrible user experience for frequent travelers). That alone is a ton of work the end user will never see but is core to their operation.

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

#62

Post by izzydata »

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…

My impression of companies pushing AI so heavily is that they are basically being forced to do it by it merely existing. Imagine if AI really is as powerful as it is suggested to be and you didn't jump on the bandwagon. Then you would be behind. So by it existing and other companies using it, you have to as well because even if it turns out to be a failure at least everyone else will have failed too and you are on an even playing field.

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

#63

Post by afavour »

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.

> Even if Uber really did double developer productivity, would it translate to quarterly results?

It would if it meant they then fired half their software engineers, which is the ultimate goal.

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

#64

Post by testbjjl »

louiereederson wrote: post #44

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 compa…

Amazon was AWS first customer. I sometimes feel if the AI companies promises of their models replacing all SWE, they would be a top 3 product/service in any number of businesses and not selling shovels to miners.

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

#65

Post by jaredklewis »

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…

This is insightful. It does sort of feel like the search for the Northwest passage.

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

#66

Post by skydhash »

kevincox wrote: post #15
dangus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don’t understand on the customer side of B2B why so many companies actively encouraged AI tooling costs. I can understand it from the side of the companies selling tokens and AI hardware. I don’t understand the race to spend more on internal tools. I’ve been sitting around waiting for my company to buy a number of necessary bits of tools. They cheap out on every solution imaginable. Datadog is too expensive,…

The logic is quite simple. Management thinks that AI can improve productivity, but knows that there will be some resistance and some learning curve. So they force people to use it so that people can 1. develop their skills and workflow and 2. find out where it is useful 3. find out what needs to be improved to make it useful. As a more obvious example consider that cars were just invented and the post office manageme…

That would be sensible if you were a car maker and not in the business of delivering posts. You’re tanking your core business, just to do what the developer of the tool should be doing (ensuring the usefulness and reliability of the tool).

I’m all for a trial run, but it needs to be done like any research experiment. With a goal and measurements along the way. Not by going blind and hurting your workers/customers.

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

#67

Post by tracerbulletx »

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…

Yeah this is right. Its about taking the throttle off of experimentation hoping some team suddenly starts shipping a years worth of features in a week and responding to strategic customer demands in near real time. Then copying what works out across the org. (and probably downsizing)

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

#69

Post by surgical_fire »

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…

> if they actually shipped features faster than before then it is still a win

Depends on the cost

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

#70

Post by DesiLurker »

rtkwe wrote: post #20
Mistletoe wrote: post #18

It feels like maybe the wheels are starting to fall off the AI hype train. I expect complete collapse once people start figuring out that the numbers on all this don’t make sense. I’m looking for investment portfolios that will weather that storm. If you are reading this and have a similar curiosity, this is a great place to start. https://portfoliocharts.com/2021/12/16/three-secret-ingredie...

I've been thinking that for years about various sources and the bubble stubbornly refuses to pop on a convenient timeline so I'm falling back on the adage "time in the market beats trying to time the market". Index funds and chill is much more relaxed than trying to determine who's actually going to survive the AI bubble popping.

this is the reason I refuse to budge from my index portfolio besides small 'play money' ventures. My investing philosophy is basically by the time it hits wire you dont know what portion of it factored in. especially in age of AI and automation IMO alpha will vanish faster as anyone can code up eqv of a bloomberg terminal themselves. So all thats left is how do you manage downturns, when market heads down 30% but your handpicked stocks go down 60% you need to have enough wherewithal to hold through bad times. this is where true test of faith comes, I believe I would be cowardly and sell out at wrong time. So its best to just hold index and market sort the bloodbath out itself.
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