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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'

#91

Post by kshri24 »

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…

This is not just me saying it. The Uber president himself says it in the article.

> so what did all those millions spent on developer salaries get them?

There was no doubt about what these developer salaries got them. It was to keep Uber stable and running in thousands of jurisdictions with varying rules/regulations.

The idea of using AI was (I hope) not just to replace developers for this purpose but to also ship features/products beyond what was already being offered. It has however not panned out as these CEOs/execs thought it would.

> They can also justify spending time and money on new features that only 0.1% of customers might use because 0.1% of their customers is a very large number.

And what are those features exactly? Because even the President of Uber doesn't seem to know:

"“That link is not there yet, right? I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25 percent more useful consumer features,’” said Macdonald."

The budget allocated to AI for the year has been wiped out in 4 months.

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

#92

Post by aantix »

niwtsol wrote: post #80
rowanseymour wrote: post #52

Now feels like a very good time to be a small team of experienced developers who can largely work on stuff by themselves and not a corporation of hundreds of developers of varying abilities all now trying to show how much code they can generate and how many tokens they can burn.

100% - I think that is also part of the divide you see online. Devs who work on massive codebases w/ 100s of engineers and see the bugs the LLMs create vs devs who work on smaller codebase w/ small <5 person team.

It's a tradeoff.

Generating a feature that is 90% correct in a tenth of the time is a reasonable tradeoff if you're trying to gain traction.

Generating a feature that is 90% correct in a tenth of the time, risking a multi-billion-dollar business, is a terrible tradeoff.

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

#93

Post by generalpf »

newaccountman2 wrote: post #77
lukeschlather wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't imagine a lot of instances where you're calling an Uber and don't have time to get yourself food Recently I got a car to take me to the train station and picked up food on the way. Seems pretty common to me. Of course, I didn't need or want it charged as a premium feature in the app.

I have never heard of someone doing that tbh, this is the first time.

You can get any Uber driver to do it for you if you offer to buy them food too and do it off the books.

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

#94

Post by pesus »

niwtsol wrote: post #81
dylan604 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even small teams are not immune from the AI push. I work in a small not using AI while receiving push that I'm a problem for not. To the point, VP of company says if we don't all start using AI we'll be out of business because other people will. :face-palm:

You don't use AI at all? What is your main justification for not?

Seems like you should have a justification for introducing a new tool instead, no? There are thousands of other tools they're also not using, but we're not asking about those.

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

#95

Post by lazide »

lenerdenator wrote: post #78
lazide wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> insane Not sure if you mean this in a good or bad way.

Good/bad entirely depends on if you are management/shareholders, or the engineer in question. It was pretty nuts either way though eh? End of an era

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

#96

Post by groby_b »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #67
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)

What those organizations miss is that they drown their teams in organizational red tape. The way to the future isn't tokenmaxxing - it's cutting back on process noise.

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

#97

Post by nitwit005 »

bluGill wrote: post #87
jrmg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could kind of use that line of thinking to justify spending on anything.

There is a fad every few years that uses similar thinking to justify spending. Sometimes they work out sometimes they don't. But they never work out as good as the most optimistic predictions.

I commented on wasteful AI spending, and my father immediately started talking about how he "went through that a couple of times" as a manager at an oil company.

The unusual thing is perhaps how global and cross industry it seems.

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

#98

Post by blensor »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #46
smelendez wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I also think in addition to that the increased speed compounds the problems much quicker. And I don't mean bugs. I mean that duplicated code here, that additional state variable to keep everything going there. Not removing things that should be removed because we can work around that, etc.

It's like building a super tall Jenga tower very quickly but laying the bricks much worse than a careful player.

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

#99

Post by johnbarron »

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…

Anthropic will not have as many husbands as they think by next year: https://xkcd.com/605/

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

#100

Post by nitwit005 »

niwtsol wrote: post #81
dylan604 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even small teams are not immune from the AI push. I work in a small not using AI while receiving push that I'm a problem for not. To the point, VP of company says if we don't all start using AI we'll be out of business because other people will. :face-palm:

You don't use AI at all? What is your main justification for not?

I'd definitely say IntelliJ improved my productivity. No one cared. If anything, management viewed it as a nuisance as they had to deal with the license.

Now there is demands to justify not using AI like this, but people don't care about details. Which AI tool I use apparently doesn't matter at all, even if there are presumably productivity differences between them.

Edit: typo

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