Uber blows through its AI budget in 1 quarter

ChuckMcM

Ruh-Roh. Chuckling aside, this is a really good thing. This is, btw, EXACTLY how enterprises figured out they weren't ready for "The Internet" in the dot com boom. They were spending millions on servers and kit and the ROI was crap.

scrlk

> after incentivizing employees to adopt the technology through an internal leaderboard ranking teams by total AI tool usage. When you pay by the dead cobra, don't be surprised when people start breeding cobras.

LoganDark

> through an internal leaderboard ranking teams by total AI tool usage 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.

cbdevidal

Pardon my ignorance but could they not switch to a cheaper model? Honest question.

stavros

Doesn't this just mean that their incentives worked too well? If I budget $1M, for the year, tell everyone to use AI as much as they can, and they spend that million in four months, so what? Next time I just tell them to spend it slower.

keithnz

My ongoing theory is for small to middle sized businesses AI is incredibly useful as it will help leverage you to grow your business by building more than you could before AI. But for big businesses, like uber, not sure the advantages are the same, they could already build what they want, so it seems the only thing that's likely is cost savings.

graphememes

> gamify usage > people abuse it > shocked_pickachu.jpg yep, sounds about right

champagnepapi

Related Discussions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976415 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268871

qsxfthnkp2322

Hurry! Fire all your employees like all the others. How else are you going to tokenmax

simonw

As far as I can tell this entire story was derived from a 2 minute segment in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_mQ6xLcKyc&t=1616s - I linked directly to the relevant section at 26:56 in the video. 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.

xvxvx

C-level FOMO strikes again. 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.

tomhow

Microsoft and Uber Are Running into an AI Cost Problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48277753 - May 2026 (6 comments) 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)

the_arun

Feeling nostalgic. There is a new tech. In the beginning everyone will be asked to go crazy on spending as much as you can & just focus on the outcome. After a while, they will see just cost is going up (less on outcomes). Now, start throttling the dollar limits per employee. By this time whole industry will settle on this new tech & reality. Everyone will learn it is not all that fancy as it sounded earlier.

rvz

But we need to keep prompting at the Anthropic casino! There is a token slot machine called "Jevons paradox" that promises as the cost of your tokens get much cheaper, you be more productive in gambling even more tokens! /s 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...

ChrisArchitect

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976415