Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/ubers-anthropic-ai-push-hits-223109852.html

by dakiol • 3 months ago

94 103 3 months ago

finance.yahoo.com

I was told AI makes people more productive so the costs should easily pay for themselves in the form of more revenue.

sputknick• 3 months ago

Maybe 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_geek12• 3 months ago

I’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.

lokar2• 3 months ago

The 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• 3 months ago

Bureaucracy 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• 3 months ago

what is demand elasticity for software?

NP-hard

nradov7• 3 months ago

Every 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.

Avicebron• 3 months ago

I'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.

idontwantthis2• 3 months ago

I’d be first in line for a three piece qiviut suit!

sd92• 3 months ago

I 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• 3 months ago

Aside 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.

sd92• 3 months ago

Maybe 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.

temp88302• 3 months ago

But why does Uber need to spend 3.4B on injecting a useless blob of text between me and an overpriced burger delivered by a struggling illegal immigrant in a smoke-belching jalopy?

I know the counter-argument. "This will increase sales". You know what else would increase sales? Spending the 3.4B to replace the above with a uniformed delivery service similar to UPS. That job could pay benefits.

onraglanroad• 3 months ago

That's not an error, it's what 5 Guys advertise. It's the number of combinations for their toppings.

mcmcmc3• 3 months ago

I think that's exactly the point. It's the distillation of the most common marketing copy possible, and when that tone is applied everywhere it becomes very same-y, like those cookie cutter neighborhoods where every house is the exact same. Which to some extent defeats the purpose of marketing as it doesn't stand out at all, just sanitized sameness. It's boring and a bit creepy.

array_key_first• 3 months ago

Right, it seems just like a marketing blip, which is bad, because marketing isn't meant to be informative, it's meant to be manipulative.

If we're using AI and we're still getting the gobbley gook nothing burger marketing word soup, then what are we doing here?

No, not everything IS rich and authentic. And no, it's not awaiting me!

ajkjk• 3 months ago

they make me feel embarrassed to be human

CJefferson• 3 months ago

So, I've just read a few dozen student reports, which I'm 95% sure were mostly generated by AI.

The problem isn't one page of one report. It's not even one whole report. But, the more you read, the more irritating it gets. It's hard not to notice the AIisms, and once you know them, it gets really obvious. And I know some people will say 'Oh, I say X', for any particular X, but the thing that people don't do is use some same construction at least twice a page, every page, forever.

Now, I can imagine there ends up being a bit of a battle, where AIs try to learn to write 'less AI', but for now, it's very obvious if you read enough AI generated stuff.

pllbnk• 3 months ago

This looks like a false advertising and in this case they can't blame it on the "human error".

skippyboxedhero2• 3 months ago

You're absolutely right.

daliusd• 3 months ago

I am disappointed that not all your comments are this line :D

gib444• 3 months ago

The only accurate summary is "shit and overpriced"

mandeepj• 3 months ago

I've never cared about those menu summaries! I always look at menu items and their descriptions. They are fine, at least to me.

mcmcmc3• 3 months ago

More than half the menu item descriptions I see now are AI generated, and some are completely inaccurate.

mikeocool• 3 months ago

The article seems to suggest the unexpected spend was primarily on coding tools, like Claude Code.

One would hope Uber could manage 1 sentence API summaries (regardless of their quality) for less than $3.4 billion.

jcgrillo2• 3 months ago

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

Out of curiosity, what do you think might be a successful application for AI in Uber's business? It seems like this is the sort of thing AI applications end up being. Does it actually get better than this?

ares623• 3 months ago

You misunderstand. AI cannot fail. It can only _be_ failed. In this case, it was failed by the restaurant industry's lack of actual diversity. _They_ need to do better, not AI.

mvdtnz2• 3 months ago

The linked article is not about usage of AI in the product. It's about blowing the budget on AI coding tools, which is a much more interesting topic to discuss given how heavily they are being pushed by some companies.

If AI coding tools were having the benefits promised by AI vendors then Uber would be dropping staff, not the tools themselves.

darth_avocado• 3 months ago

They’re investing in the wrong bits of AI

They’re investing on the wrong bits, not wrong bits of AI. No matter how many features they come up with after spending billions of dollars, customers are not any more likely to order food than they already are. The money is better spent reducing their atrocious fees and making sure the restaurant isn’t marking up every single menu item by 25%.

nradov7• 3 months ago

I don't necessarily disagree, but it seems like there are plenty of customers willing to pay ridiculous prices for delivering mediocre food.

parpfish• 3 months ago

Product reviews from real people are useful because they are allowed to say negative things.

Once you bypass the real reviews for a summary, all those useful negative signals get glossed over because the host platform doesn’t want to piss off the restaurants by propagating those negative comments.

wat100002• 3 months ago

I don't want my fries and milkshakes to await. I want them to be made fresh when I order them. Silly robots.

jatins• 3 months ago

Yeah, what's going on in these cos is that a PM is tasked to find ways of integrating AI into product and well if someone's payroll depends on it they _will_ find ways to integrate AI into product. "Hey I couldn't find ways to integrate AI into product" is not an acceptable response.

And it's not just Uber. My weather app has an AI weather summary these days

epistasis• 3 months ago

This 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• 3 months ago

Holy 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.

nradov7• 3 months ago

Why 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.

pfannkuchen2• 3 months ago

It’s being subsidized by investor cash bonfires right now isn’t it? TBD if it gets cheap to operate before those run out.

syntaxing2• 3 months ago

3.4B 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• 3 months ago

It's probably all AI spending, including them doing AI stuff for their products.

gigatexal2• 3 months ago

oh 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-det...

3eb7988a1663• 3 months ago

If 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.

feedtheclank• 3 months ago

"My delivery service CEO told me the AI keep eating his tokens so I asked how many tokens he has and he said he just goes to the token shop and gets a new batch of tokens afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding tokens to the AI and then his laid off workers started crying."

happyopossum• 3 months ago

That’s the entire R&D budget - the article is completely lacking in actual details, such as how much was spent on Ai

gwern• 3 months ago

Apparent source: https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/applied-ai/uber-c...

650• 3 months ago

Large companies have been incentivizing and correlating token spend to performance, thus creating needless spend of tokens for now. Goodharts Law and all that.

Groxx• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

Based 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• 3 months 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?

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There's my answer. Here's a helpful uBlock Origin filter:

    ||finance.yahoo.com^

edot• 3 months ago

Yes, 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.

lupire2• 3 months ago

Yahoo doesn't have journalism. It's a syndication portal. https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/26/04/51828848/ubers-a...

i_love_retros• 3 months ago

Only 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• 3 months 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.

mizzao2• 3 months ago

The good ol' measuring inputs, not outputs...

(Other inputs from days of yore: number of people that report to you, budget allocation to your team. Nothing new under the sun!)

evnp2• 3 months ago

Is there an xyz's law for this yet? Will add - lines of code (as long as you don't believe code is the product/output).

cyberax• 3 months ago

Look, 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• 3 months ago

I 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• 3 months ago

I wonder how many engineers are using their unlimited token budgets to moonlight new startups.

mizzao2• 3 months ago

Even those new startups still require products to be built in a productive and sustainable way beyond the first prototype...

mvdtnz2• 3 months ago

This 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• 3 months ago

This reads as if 100% of Uber’s R&D spend went to tokens. It did not.

lupire2• 3 months ago

Syndicated from 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• 3 months ago

I 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• 3 months ago

Hi 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.

Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall

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