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    Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it's worth it
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    Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it’s worth it


    Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it’s worth it

    Posted by nyclover11

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    16 Comments

    1. quadranting on

      My friend with a bike works at one of the biggest tech companies and said that they also keep burning through their AI tokens so quickly they have to keep rotating which LLM they’re using depending on which one’s been topped up enough.

    5. festivus4allofus on

      not everything is meant to use ai and this was always going to happen. it’s just to expensive to run and will continue to be for a long while especially seeing as how it’s really not delivering on the actual cost/benefit equation rn

      once an actual company like microsoft noped out of forcing it everywhere and just focuses on certain segments, it became clear that the insanely wide use required to.keep things afloat would’t happen for a while

    6. cenosillicaphobiac on

      We’re hitting that point at my work as well. USE AI FOR EVERYTHING has turned into scheduled meetings for all engineers “using tokens and requests responsibly” plus they’re raising the cost of each request for Copilot for Github.

    7. KimJongFunk on

      So everyone was incentivized to use AI as much as possible and team performance was based on how high AI usage was and now they’re wondering why they burned through all the usage tokens?

      There are some legit use cases for AI, but forcing people to use AI for BS use cases will result in this. People were probably churning through tokens for stupid crap to make to look like their usage rates look higher.

    9. Dry-Yak5277 on

      Is this the bubble popping? Because the job market is the worst it’s been in a long time 

    10. actuallywaffles on

      Easy. AI is never worth it.

      Can I get a COO salary for being able to answer stupidly obvious questions too?

    11. 11Slip532 on

      >The comments follow reports that the firm had already burnt through its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget in just four months after **incentivizing employees to adopt the technology through an internal leaderboard ranking teams by total AI tool usage.** 

      When the measure becomes the metric, it ceases to be an effective measure.

    12. FrostySquirrel820 on

      I have no idea if it’s worth “it” or not.

      But I’d also question if the person tasked with monitoring monthly expenditure is also worth it.

    15. coconutpiecrust on

      Of course it’s worth it. Just one more data centre, bro. One more data centre will achieve AGI.