Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall
finance.yahoo.comI 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.
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.
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.
Don'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.
It 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".
Most restaurant food is all the same though because they buy everything from Sysco.
That's like saying most home cooking in the country is the same because everything comes from Walmart/Kroger/Meijer.
No, you're missing the point. A lot of casual restaurants aren't even really cooking any more. They just heat up prepared food purchased from Sysco.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/restaurant-consoli...
"A lot of" and "most" are different things.
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.
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.
>It's hard not to notice the AIisms, and once you know them, it gets really obvious.
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.
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.
That's not an error, it's what 5 Guys advertise. It's the number of combinations for their toppings.
That sounds like an error to me. "Number of toppings" is not the same as "Number of possible combinations of toppings".
Shouldn’t it be a lot more? Around 20 toppings in any combination and count would be 20! + 19! + 18! … no?
2^20
Does order of toppings matter?
yes, only a monster would put the pickles underneath the tomato
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.
My last job did something similar. An AI blurb feature was researched and built and costs a good chunk of resources to run for no reason other than being able to tell investors AI was being used.
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.
> But why does Uber need to spend 3.4B on injecting a useless blob of text
They didn't. 3.4B was their total R&B cost. Don't blame AI for your human hallucination.
My R&B cost used to amount to buying the occasional Al Green album, how times have changed
Why does a fast food delivery service need a research arm in the first place? It's not exactly rocket surgery.
In most large tech companies the senior leaders want to run some vanity projects so having a research arm makes that possible. They can screw around without impacting product teams.
R&D is literally what built uber and uber eats. Research to determine the product and _development_ to build it.
For the same reason the shoe industry spends billions sponsoring athletes and sports teams to hawk their gear. It's to build layer upon layer of abstractions to move the conversation away from how the sausage is made, and towards something that could justify their own bloated salaries, like promoting "sporting excellence" or "tech innovation".
This looks like a false advertising and in this case they can't blame it on the "human error".
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!
they make me feel embarrassed to be human
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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?
You're absolutely right.
I am disappointed that not all your comments are this line :D
That's a very insightful observation, highlighting the genuine tension between consistent messaging and quick, pithy responses on Hacker News.
i have a solid picture now, the honest answer is: you're absolutely right
I don't want my fries and milkshakes to await. I want them to be made fresh when I order them. Silly robots.
> 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%.
I don't necessarily disagree, but it seems like there are plenty of customers willing to pay ridiculous prices for delivering mediocre food.
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.
I've never cared about those menu summaries! I always look at menu items and their descriptions. They are fine, at least to me.
More than half the menu item descriptions I see now are AI generated, and some are completely inaccurate.
I stopped ordering after I realized most places were using ai photos and descriptions. It’s worse than the stock images they’d use in the old days. It’s actively lying about what an item is.
The only accurate summary is "shit and overpriced"
> 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^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.
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.
Yahoo doesn't have journalism. It's a syndication portal. https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/26/04/51828848/ubers-a...
>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.
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.
”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.
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!)
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).
There's Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
There it is. Thanks!
I was told AI makes people more productive so the costs should easily pay for themselves in the form of more revenue.
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.
I’d be first in line for a three piece qiviut suit!
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.
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.
I'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.
You just need to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and start your own artisanal hand-grilled hotdog food truck.
> I'm working as a software engineer as we speak.
Well, there’s your problem. Get back to making the hotdogs!
I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hotdog today (if you want to get a circular investment bubble going)
Do you sell hotdog options? I want some hotdogs at a guaranteed price, but only next week. (I just want upside exposure)
I'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.
I will sell you hotdog default swaps. Even if I lose, I win.
Is a synthetic hotdog default swap considered vegan in Cali?
If yes, my ESG fund is interested.
Collateralized hotDog Obligations made up of MBS (Mostly Bones and Sawdust) would be a financial product I could sell to institutional investors!
I suppose a discount code is effectively a hotdog option.
I 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!
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).
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.
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.
My experience in non-software orgs was they always want more then they can get, and in software/service companies customers always want more.
>what is demand elasticity for software?
NP-hard
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.
Apparent source: https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/applied-ai/uber-c...
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.
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.
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
It's probably all AI spending, including them doing AI stuff for their products.
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...
Curious how it works in other countries, do employees get a portion of the payout?
We have virtual shares that vest on sale. I won’t be rich. Enough to take a nice trip to Mallorca after taxes.
That’s the entire R&D budget - the article is completely lacking in actual details, such as how much was spent on Ai
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.
"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."
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.
Large companies have been incentivizing and correlating token spend to performance, thus creating needless spend of tokens for now. Goodharts Law and all that.
I wonder how many engineers are using their unlimited token budgets to moonlight new startups.
Even those new startups still require products to be built in a productive and sustainable way beyond the first prototype...
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.
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?
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.
This reads as if 100% of Uber’s R&D spend went to tokens. It did not.
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.
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.
It’s being subsidized by investor cash bonfires right now isn’t it? TBD if it gets cheap to operate before those run out.
So what? Even if investor cash runs out the price of compute capacity always declines over the long term.
Okay what if cash run out before compute price decline? Grug grug.