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.
—-
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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%.
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.
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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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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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?
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.
103 comments
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.
And besides that, this just feels like something nobody asked for that probably doesn’t sell more food compared to, for example, more pictures.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/restaurant-consoli...
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.
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.
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.
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!
If AI coding tools were having the benefits promised by AI vendors then Uber would be dropping staff, not the tools themselves.
And it's not just Uber. My weather app has an AI weather summary these days
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.
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?
> 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%.
>
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?
> UNLOCKED: 5 NEW TRADES EVERY WEEK. Click now to get top trade ideas daily, plus unlimited access to cutting-edge tools and strategies to gain an edge in the markets.
There's my answer. Here's a helpful uBlock Origin filter:
>
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.
Token maxxing? Might explain high costs if you are actively encouraging developers to spend as much tokens as possible.
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.
It's a poorly written junk article upvoted based on Uber/Anthropomorphic sentiment. I recommend flagging it.
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.
6 months later
Hi everyone. We are over budget.
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?
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.