Posted by _____k 5 hours ago
The former is the issue, and how many companies have been operating. It's like a trucking company ranking driver effectiveness by fuel used instead of by cargo moved.
But on a more serious note, do we know how much Uber spent per technical employee/month? I assume it is far more than even any of those $200 "max ai" plans.
And the other question is how much the public would be willing to spend, in my estimation this is as "cheap" as it will ever get (main-stream at least).
Am in a random small company, colleague spent 100 EUR a day on Sonnet through AWS Bedrock (needed to use a EU region). Paying for tokens will get you in a deep hole financially compared to any of the subscriptions, unless it's like DeepSeek or one of the other models that are priced a bit better, though that's also a tradeoff in what they can/cannot do and also where the data goes. Ended up trying out the Mistral subscription for the US stuff btw, it was fine.
> Adoption climbed from 32 percent of engineers in February to 84 percent classified as agentic coding users by March. By spring, 95 percent of Uber engineers used artificial intelligence tools monthly, and roughly 70 percent of committed code originated from those tools. About 11 percent of live backend updates were written by agents with no human in the loop, according to Uber's own disclosures.
> The numbers behind the spend are what make the story instructive rather than anecdotal. Monthly cost per engineer ranged from $150 to $250 on average, with power users running between $500 and $2,000.
My guess is that the reason to rethink AI-spend was probably the exponential growth in cost over time, and tokenmaxxing payoff not being immediately obvious as mentioned in the article.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2026/05/17/uber-bu...
Adds nothing insightful to these discussions.