Uber's AI Push Hits a Wall–CTO Says Budget Struggles Despite $3.4B Spend

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.

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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.

> 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^

>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.

”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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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