Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall(finance.yahoo.com) |
Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall(finance.yahoo.com) |
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.
And besides that, this just feels like something nobody asked for that probably doesn’t sell more food compared to, for example, more pictures.
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.
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.
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!
If AI coding tools were having the benefits promised by AI vendors then Uber would be dropping staff, not the tools themselves.
And it's not just Uber. My weather app has an AI weather summary these days
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.
One would hope Uber could manage 1 sentence API summaries (regardless of their quality) for less than $3.4 billion.
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?
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%.
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^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.
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.
Token maxxing? Might explain high costs if you are actively encouraging developers to spend as much tokens as possible.
(Other inputs from days of yore: number of people that report to you, budget allocation to your team. Nothing new under the sun!)
So what can you do?
Buy as many hot dogs as you can. Buy stock in hot dog companies.
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).
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.
NP-hard
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.
It's a poorly written junk article upvoted based on Uber/Anthropomorphic sentiment. I recommend flagging it.
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.
[1] it's public knowledge https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
6 months later
Hi everyone. We are over budget.
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?
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.
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.
Maybe I haven't read enough uber eats descriptions to notice, but at least from the sampling above it doesn't seem too obviously AI. There might be a lot of cliche wording, but it's not even clear whether it's worse than human reviews/descriptions.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/restaurant-consoli...
Does order of toppings matter?
I proposed a solution using simple heuristics that would have accomplished the same output, would have been cheaper to build and cost next to nothing to run, but being economical, efficient and boring doesn't make exciting PowerPoint slides.
They didn't. 3.4B was their total R&B cost. Don't blame AI for your human hallucination.
Yes, a lot of places are not making their own jalepeno poppers. There's still plenty of stuff being made from raw ingredients all over the place.
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.
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!