Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48277485 - May 2026 (132 comments)
Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268871 - May 2026 (334 comments)
Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976415 - May 2026 (475 comments)
Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
When you pay by the dead cobra, don't be surprised when people start breeding cobras.
The classic example is the Second Fleet of convicts that were sent to Australia - they were paid per convict that boarded the ships. 40% of them died. Unsurprisingly perhaps, slave traders won that contract.
They started paying per live convict landed in Australia after that.
A COO at a ~$150B firm like Uber certainly should know what the outcome will be before the leaderboard goes up. Really makes you wonder if the board was incentivising him to increase AI usage; job done, bonus unlocked.
Let’s be blunt: any CEO or executive that fell for this AI wealth extraction needs to be fired ASAP. These are not the type of people who you want running a company.
My own company hired a new CEO in Q1 and in his first company address he declared that anyone not using AI for their daily duties was putting themselves out of a job and would be unemployable by anyone else. I laughed at that nonsense. 5 months later and we’ve seen zero growth or improvements due to AI. This chucklehead CEO will be the unemployable one.
This is quite literally the opposite of reality, and it's funny to see internet experts that haven't so much as raised 100k always criticize seasoned C-level execs. Not that C-levels are geniuses or something (in fact a lot of times they're idiots), but there's a very good reason people are flocking to AI. The downside is relatively minor: a few million wasted, whatever; while the upside could be generational: being on the forefromt of an internet-level technology.
It's easy to make fun of bad ideas in retrospect (the Metaverse, VR, blockchain, etc.) but what people forget is that good ideas are often indistinguishable from bad ideas. So you should (as a tech company; not as a bank or as a hospital) generally prefer a CEO that's willing to swing for the fences rather than someone timid and overly conservative.
Regarding the Metaverse, VR, blockchain, etc. people were antagonistic towards them at the time, not in retrospect. If anything, people are showing much more hatred towards AI than any of these aforementioned technologies.
The chucklehead CEO will get a severance package worth more than you've made in your life and walk into another C-suite position courtesy of his golfing buddies.
Your version is a lovely thing to daydream about, though.
If you watch the video snippet it seems a whole lot less of a big deal than all of the headlines that have come out of it.
yep, sounds about right
So you were encouraging people (in fact, practically threatening people) to waste as many tokens as possible. No wonder you blew through the budget so quickly.
Except what Uber is experiencing is that the tokens are not getting cheaper and the employees are gambling even more tokens and using up the budget; racking up expensive bills for Uber. So they are blowing through their budget.
It is at least cheaper to gamble your tokens with DeepSeek's or Xiaomi's casinos and they have just announced a permanent 99% off deal with an allocation of 100 trillion tokens! [0]
That is a great deal, with a small catch. (If you are fine with sending your data and prompts to them)
[0] https://platform.xiaomimimo.com/docs/en-US/news/v2.5-price-u...