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Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall
- amazingamazing 6mo agoI was told AI makes people more productive so the costs should easily pay for themselves in the form of more revenue.
- sputknick 6mo agoMaybe the lesson here is we shouldn't rely on the guys selling picks and shovels when determining if we should be buying picks and shovels.
- nyc_data_geek1 6mo agoI’m the CEO of a hot dog company. I’ve worked on hot dogs for 10 years. And I wasn’t prepared for what I’ve just seen. Your life is about to change. So what can you do? Buy as many hot dogs as you can. Buy stock in hot dog companies.
- giaour 6mo agoI will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hotdog today (if you want to get a circular investment bubble going)
- snovv_crash 6mo agoDo you sell hotdog options? I want some hotdogs at a guaranteed price, but only next week. (I just want upside exposure)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- maratc 6mo agoI'd take these options from several companies (all selling hotdogs) and wrap them up in Collateral Hotdog Obligations which I'd then offer to investors.
- nyc_data_geek1 6mo agoI will sell you hotdog default swaps. Even if I lose, I win.
- tickerticker 6mo agoIs a synthetic hotdog default swap considered vegan in Cali?
- snovv_crash 6mo agoIf yes, my ESG fund is interested.
- skeeter2020 6mo agoCollateralized hotDog Obligations made up of MBS (Mostly Bones and Sawdust) would be a financial product I could sell to institutional investors!
- HPsquared 6mo agoI suppose a discount code is effectively a hotdog option.
- Bridged7756 6mo agoI'm a hot dog chef with over 20 years of experience. Credited with inventing 274 hot dog styles. International awards. World renowned and industry figure. My entire team, very competent hot dog experts, was laid off after a hot dog cooking machine could do what took us 3 months, in just one day. I've been out of a job for 12 months. The reason? All hot dog making has been offloaded to Claudog Hotdog. "Sorry. Hot dog manual cooking is a thing of the past", one recruiter told me. I'm working as a software engineer as we speak. I keep applying to hot dog related positions but I get no interviews. Even positions significantly below my pay grade and skillset. No one is hiring. Hot dog cooking is over. We are entering a new era.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- thewhitetulip 6mo agoI build bicycles. I was shocked when our internal team built a bicycle that goes to the moon We are afraid to release it to the public! And thus we are shutting down the company. We don't want humans polluting Moon and the atmosphere and space!
- lokar 6mo agoThe main question is: what is demand elasticity for software? If it low, and lower prices won’t generate much new demand, we should expect AI to improve engineering productivity, and for companies to reduce staff. If it is high, then we should see companies hire more engineers, increase output and lower prices (and earn more).
- w10-1 6mo agoBureaucracy creates work so long as it owns the production function. In software that's typically through system upgrades, new API's, etc. The system will grow in internal complexity to its carrying capacity. You'd need someone who understands how to replace parts to prune, but they don't really have the incentive. This effect is reduced where software is less essential to the product, but any software-heavy product (particularly with a moat) will be more susceptible. Companies try to manage it via CI/CD, outsourcing and internal competition, but no, companies can't magically reduce staff. They can, however, inject fear, which is good for reducing overt bureaucratic games, but actually increases covert bureaucracy and reduces knowledge-sharing, making the problem worse. Only when incentives are aligned - when developers have an (equity) stake in growing the company - can the culture be open and efficient.
- balamatom 6mo ago>what is demand elasticity for software? NP-hard
- nradov 6mo agoEvery time the cost of software development has gone down due to higher level tools we've gotten higher software budgets, more software developers, and more released software. Demand appears to be effectively infinite.
- lokar 6mo agoMy experience in non-software orgs was they always want more then they can get, and in software/service companies customers always want more.
- Avicebron 6mo agoI'm coming around to it being like getting a pair of industrial grade yak clippers. Yes, there will be a lot of shiny yaks, but the market for shiny yaks is low.
- idontwantthis 6mo agoI’d be first in line for a three piece qiviut suit!
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- openclawclub 6mo ago[flagged]
- sd9 6mo agoI see things like 2 sentence menu summaries in Uber Eats that are completely off in tone. A quick sample from my app right now: “Authentic Caribbean Flavours. Jerk Chicken, Curry Goat, and more. A vibrant culinary journey awaits.” - local Caribbean place “Customisable burgers with 250,000+ toppings. Hand-cut fries and rich milkshakes await.” - Five Guys “Authentic Indian cuisine bursting with rich flavours. Perfect for late-night cravings” - local Indian Everything is Authentic, or Rich, or whatever. —- They’re investing in the wrong bits of AI. I’m sure they’re AB testing these soulless often inaccurate blurbs but I just cannot see how investing money into them actually sells more product. On the other hand, if they had a coherent product vision, and trusted their engineers to use AI how they see fit, then I’m sure they would be more successful, and it would be cheaper.
- kelnos 6mo agoAside from the hilarious "250,000+ toppings" error, these summaries seem... fine? I would be unsurprised to learn that a human came up with them, even. Seems like pretty common/standard marketing copy.
- sd9 6mo agoMaybe each one is fine in isolation - what doesn’t come across from the sample is that every single one is practically the same. If you have Uber Eats, open up the app and look through the summaries for a bunch of restaurants and you’ll see what I mean. And besides that, this just feels like something nobody asked for that probably doesn’t sell more food compared to, for example, more pictures.
- yorwba 6mo agoDon't worry, they'll also use AI to add more pictures, which will all look strangely similar while bearing at best passing resemblance to anything you might actually receive after placing an order.
- recursivecaveat 6mo agoIt seems to have been at least slightly improved, but youtube video summaries suffered from this to an almost comical degree not long ago. The AI voice is already pretty recognizable and stilted, then you constrain it to avoid saying anything negative or spoilery about the video, and (presumably) don't let it remember past output. No surprise its extremely repetitive. For humans you're at least getting different people's voices, on different days, who remember that they just wrote about how the last one was a "unique look highlighting the importance of design".
- epistasis 6mo agoThis makes it sound like they spent $3.4B on tooling, but is it actually on salaries? Hardware? Probably 5k-6k hires in the department, at say $350k/employee costs, is $2.1B which still leaves a ton of extra costs somewhere. Are they sending $1B to Anthropic? Weird and uninformetive article.
- woeirua 6mo agoHoly misleading headlines Batman. They're not spending $3.4B on solely tokens for Anthropic are they? I don't think so... If anything the CTO is just saying, we're blowing through token budgets way faster than expected as the uptake is so immense. I think that's right from what I've seen. Once people get it, they start using AI for everything. Obviously that's not going to be sustainable forever. I do think we're going to see a lot of adaptive routing in the future to cheaper models for more mundane tasks, whereas right now everything is getting routed to Opus regardless of real need.
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- nradov 6mo agoWhy would that not be sustainable forever? Over the long run the price per token is likely to decline as both hardware and software gets more efficient.
- pfannkuchen 6mo agoIt’s being subsidized by investor cash bonfires right now isn’t it? TBD if it gets cheap to operate before those run out.
- nradov 6mo agoSo what? Even if investor cash runs out the price of compute capacity always declines over the long term.
- pfannkuchen 6mo agoOkay what if cash run out before compute price decline? Grug grug.
- syntaxing 6mo ago3.4B in 4.5 months…is that all going to Anthropic? Makes it seem so with the wording and how they’re pivoting to Codex too
- dmix 6mo agoIt's probably all AI spending, including them doing AI stuff for their products.
- gigatexal 6mo agooh man uber is acquiring the company I work for [1] and we currently really like Claude ... but if Codex is better so be it. I just really, really, really like Claude Code as a front end. Guess I'll have to make it talk Codex instead. [1] it's public knowledge https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2026/Uber-to-Acquire-Global-Chauffeur-Service-Leader-Blacklane/default.aspx https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
- 3eb7988a1663 6mo agoIf it is anything like my company, sign enormous deals to AI startups that have existed for 8 months, and do little more than provider wrappers around someone else's model. Then hire three different firms that do the same thing because each division has to prove how much more AI they are than the others. Have a handful of internal engineers who have no idea what they are doing, but get approval to build and run an internal B200 server farm. Ensure any big jobs are done through some kind of white-glove offering from Amazon/Azure that removes complexity, but charges astronomical rates.
- gwern 6mo agoApparent source: https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/applied-ai/uber-cto-shows-claude-code-can-blow-ai-budgets https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/applied-ai/uber-c...
- ibrahimhossain 6mo ago[dead]
- sastraxi 6mo ago[dead]
- 650 6mo agoLarge companies have been incentivizing and correlating token spend to performance, thus creating needless spend of tokens for now. Goodharts Law and all that.
- Groxx 6mo ago>Despite spending $3.4 billion on research and development, the company has already exhausted its planned AI budget just months into 2026. This, and the rest of the article, does does not seem to support that they spent 3.4B on AI. The text implies that the R&D budget for the entire company is 3.4 billion (which sounds vaguely reasonable given that market cap), and the portion of that which was earmarked for AI is already spent. I have no idea what the AI spend is there (although I assume it's not small), and the article doesn't provide any number either. Those are extremely different things (unless there's evidence that 100% of R&D is spent on AI) and that headline seems to be intentionally misleading.
- shermantanktop 6mo agoBased on my direct experience of similar budgets, you are exactly correct. AI coding tools don’t incur costs like this. AI costs are dominated by runtime and offline inference as part of business- and customer-facing workloads. AI isn’t cheap, but what is especially not cheap is trying to get results that exceed ~80% in quality. Developers can tolerate gaps, customers won’t.
- neilv 6mo ago> According to The Information, Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga said Uber is now "back to the drawing board" after a surge in the use of AI coding tools, particularly Anthropic's Claude Code, has blown past internal expectations. Of usage costs? > The payoff is starting to show. Around 11% of Uber's live backend code updates are now written by AI agents, up sharply in just a few months. These systems power everything from ride-matching to pricing and bug fixes. That's not a payoff. What is the immediate cost of those code updates, what is the quality, how do they affect longer-term maintenance, how does that compare to doing it without "AI", etc. Are these articles written to inform or to hype? > UNLOCKED: 5 NEW TRADES EVERY WEEK. Click now to get top trade ideas daily, plus unlimited access to cutting-edge tools and strategies to gain an edge in the markets. There's my answer. Here's a helpful uBlock Origin filter: ||finance.yahoo.com^
- edot 6mo agoYes, yahoo “journalism” is garbage. The primary source of this story is paywalled, so I can’t actually see what it said, but this AI (or otherwise crappy) summary is worthless.
- lupire 6mo agoYahoo doesn't have journalism. It's a syndication portal. https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/26/04/51828848/ubers-anthropic-ai-push-hits-wall-cto-says-budget-struggles-despite-spend https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/26/04/51828848/ubers-a...
- i_love_retros 6mo agoOnly 11%!? Slackers. My team's project is 100% coding agent generated as pushed for by our dear leaders. Yes I'm very scared for when it all crashes down and really hope I'm not there when it does.
- jpalomaki 6mo ago”Engineers were actively encouraged to use tools like Claude Code and Cursor, even ranking them on internal leaderboards based on usage” Token maxxing? Might explain high costs if you are actively encouraging developers to spend as much tokens as possible.
- cyberax 6mo agoLook, we're using Uber Eats to order food for "free food Tuesdays" in our office. I'm struggling to not puke using their interface, and a couple of times I gave up ordering even though it was free. Every click can take 2-5 seconds to be processed, without any indication. Menus glitch. I once got 2 copies of my order because I rage-clicked the "Finish" button several times. So you're trying to do high-end AI when you can't make a basic fucking form-based webapp work?!? What do you expect?
- nickvec 6mo agoI previously worked at Uber and there were constantly internal complaints that went unheard regarding the enshittification of the UI. Since Uber really hasn't had much innovation going on in the last few years, (imo) frontend teams are forced to justify their existence/employment by adding changes to the UI that look great on paper but in practice are not. As for all the associated bugs, it's inexcusable and I'm still unsure how most of them even get by QA. Engineering culture there has gone downhill; I saw the majority of great engineers leave during my tenure after being fed up with the endless cronyism + promo-project culture.
- sowbug 6mo agoI wonder how many engineers are using their unlimited token budgets to moonlight new startups.
- mizzao 6mo agoEven those new startups still require products to be built in a productive and sustainable way beyond the first prototype...
- mvdtnz 6mo agoThis article is very unclear. It says that "Despite spending $3.4 billion on research and development, the company has already exhausted its planned AI budget just months into 2026" - does this mean the budget for AI coding tools is $3.4B? Or the budget on R&D (product development) at Uber? Then later, "Uber's R&D expenses rose 9% to $3.4 billion in 2025, and the company expects that figure to keep climbing—suggesting AI may be as much a cost driver as a productivity lever" - so what's the 2026 budget? (From a quick googling Uber operates on a December 31-ending financial year). The the article says "Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga said Uber is now "back to the drawing board" after a surge in the use of AI coding tools". But then says "The financial pressure is already building. Uber's R&D expenses rose 9% to $3.4 billion in 2025, and the company expects that figure to keep climbing". So are they "back to the drawing board" (pulling back on the tooling) or plowing on and continuing to grow the costs? The article goes on to say "The payoff is starting to show. Around 11% of Uber's live backend code updates are now written by AI agents, up sharply in just a few months. These systems power everything from ride-matching to pricing and bug fixes.". So what am I to draw from this? What actually was the budget? And was it blown? And if so, what is the consequence? This is just such a bizarre piece.
- mrcwinn 6mo agoThis reads as if 100% of Uber’s R&D spend went to tokens. It did not.
- lupire 6mo agoSyndicated from https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/26/04/51828848/ubers-anthropic-ai-push-hits-wall-cto-says-budget-struggles-despite-spend https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/26/04/51828848/ubers-a... It's a poorly written junk article upvoted based on Uber/Anthropomorphic sentiment. I recommend flagging it.
- fnordpiglet 6mo agoI think the article is very deceptive in its framing. They spent 9% more; not $3.2B more. That’s $300m more which is frankly not that much. Firms spent way more than that on cloud adoption or before that web adoption in prior cycles.
- slopinthebag 6mo agoHi everyone. We are going to rate your performance directly on how much money you cost the company to do your job. The more money you spend doing your job, the better your performance review. 6 months later Hi everyone. We are over budget.
- Dana224 5mo ago[dead]