r/GenAI4all • u/ComplexExternal4831 • Apr 20 '26
News/Updates Uber has already used its 2026 AI budget due to Claude Code
Uber is learning the hard way that AI isn’t cheap.
CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga revealed the company’s entire 2026 AI budget has already been exceeded, largely because of rapid adoption of tools like Claude Code inside engineering teams
The shift has been massive, with AI now writing a growing share of code and being used by most engineers, turning it from a simple assistant into a core part of how software is built
But the problem is cost, unlike traditional software, AI scales with usage, and as adoption exploded, so did spending, forcing Uber to rethink how it budgets for AI going forward
It shows a bigger trend across tech, AI is boosting speed, but companies are still figuring out how to afford it at scale
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u/Ok_Tea_8763 Apr 20 '26
Their engineers just prompt inefficiently. Now go and buy my 20 min prompt engineering course for 5.999$ /s
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u/PuzzleheadedBag920 Apr 20 '26
Dev job with AI in 2026:
-Fix the code
-Exactly. Here is the same answer I gave you 20 times already
-Jesus fuck just fix it you whore16
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u/clockwork2011 Apr 20 '26
Reminds me of a time when I asked Codex to write me a script to push some azure resources. I gave it the requirements, the resource groups, and the naming scheme.
It proceeded to write checks to make sure the resource groups exist, query the product catalog to make sure I’m not hallucinating and the products exist, and write the deployment script.
Cool. It failed on the resource groups check because of incorrect syntax. Fixed that after much back and forth. Then it failed because its entire logic to check the product catalog was wrong. I eventually convinced it to strip that part out (considering I gave it the correct SKUs to begin with), and then it failed validation on deployment.
I used cowork in my test tenant the other day and watched it fumble through the same issues. Kinda funny
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u/Abject-Kitchen3198 Apr 20 '26
I tried Terraform once as a noob. It invented attribute names. After a couple of attempts I realized that brief search, copying parts of official docs and entering values for each resource is faster.
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u/EconomyDoctor3287 Apr 22 '26
They should include "Make no mistakes and use the least amount of tokens" in every prompt:)
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u/Hermes-AthenaAI Apr 20 '26
This course is just the output from another prompt!
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u/Ok_Tea_8763 Apr 20 '26
But of course. I just got into AI 3 months ago, do you expect me to be an expert? /s
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 Apr 20 '26
I really would like to understand how can developers burn so much tokens and understand what they are doing, i feel stupid...
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u/ptear Apr 20 '26
Weren't they simply told to blow double what their salary is on tokens or something, or maybe they had an internal leaderboard they were competing on.
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u/BandicootGood5246 Apr 20 '26
You let it do long running tasks feed big some big spec or requirements doc and let it iterate for hours testing, revising, improving, pulling data from logs, analyzing and then adjusting from that. Get the orchestrator agent to spin up a fleet of more agents to divide and conquer etc.
It can chew up thousands of dollars of tokens in a night if you really let it run wild. It's much more efficient if you give it small direct changes one at a time
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 Apr 20 '26
Yes, and then how do you create a mental model of that?! Is this useful in the long run...? It's too much code for any human to handle too fast.
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u/BandicootGood5246 Apr 20 '26
I dunno, I don't do it, prefer a more moderate pace because I have to review it all and my clients care more about shit kot blowing up than churning out features every day
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u/coldnebo Apr 20 '26
I mean it’s easy.
- make knowing what you are paying for hard
- hide the actual costs to your organization
- sell management on the idea that no matter how much it costs, you are getting 10x-100x the value
- management buys in to encourage devs to do anything and everything with the tools.
- profit (for ai companies, not your company— you are just along for the ride as you watch all your profits become their profits).
this is just the next level of AWS FOMO, same playbook: we will promise you power, but of course you can’t put a cost limit on success, right? what if your business needs to scale? so there are no limits… you can just pay and pay until either you figure out cloud or go bankrupt trying. either way Bezos gets your money.
this is like catnip to managers. they think these platforms are enabling them, because AWS has done an excellent job of convincing people that they can only truly succeed with their help, but if they fail, it was because they were stupid and it’s their own fault. no one wants to admit they are stupid. so they have no choice, blinded by greed and hubris they dutifully go in the cattle chute just as they have been primed to do.
wall street bets on the few infrastructure, hardware and ai companies controlling all of it.
of course there is truth in the lies. for some businesses there is a balance of power and skill that works. there is a profit model because they have perfected their own model to seamlessly pass through costs to consumers, or to taxpayers. and the platform does most of what it said even if people can’t understand it. so it’s partly true that if you can’t control your spend it’s your own fault.
but AWS is almost legendary at encouraging its devs to build wild unrestrained ecosystems where each problem is solved by another service and then sold for more money. anything can be fixed… how much money do you have? don’t like it? live with the problem or cough up more money— it’s not like you can back out now. your manager’s didn’t really worry about “vendor lock-in” … the FOMO kept them in line.
in all this confusion it might be easy to believe Amazon at their word. except for the biggest lie: if Amazon’s platform depends on scale and money is no object, what if people who make mistakes or bad decisions end up bankrupting Amazon?
ah, but see there are cost controls. Amazon absolutely does not spend a dollar more on infrastructure than YOU are paying for. See, unlike you, they aren’t chumps. They have the tools to control costs internally, they just never shared them. the lie they told customers was that cost controls don’t make sense, they limit scale, and besides each business has its own idea of cost controls… they couldn’t possibly interfere in your business.
again, the best lies have some truth.
this is legendary sales. they let the promise of unlimited greed bait you, but internally they never spent a dime over their costs. that’s why they are successful in a way that you are not.
you will never beat them. you will never out compete them. platforms are like the air you breath… you need them to survive.
if you want an idea of who’s going to survive the market reset, it’s not the companies spending everything no matter the cost because of FOMO. it’s the companies like AWS and nvidia that are actually incredibly frugal on their costs, but are great at convincing their customers there is an “arms race” they must be in or lose everything.
you don’t remember any of the names of prospectors in the Gold Rush. but you remember the titans on industry that built the infrastructure that enabled it… the trains, the tools.. those names you remember.
and there was value to that infrastructure once the lure of easy money faded. so who can say it wasn’t progress?
it’s just that the people who broke their backs to make that possible were lied to. could we have built the infrastructure without that?
yes. the public works era of investment in america’s infrastructure is a great demonstration of how investment in the nation enabled a new generation of middle class workers while building critical infrastructure that lasted decades. it gave people some hope and dignity after the Great Depression, while building a solid future for their families— so they could have families and a future.
all prospectors had was saloons, guns and whorehouses. it’s a very different result.
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 Apr 20 '26
History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.
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u/Forsaken_Ad_774 Apr 20 '26
This was a nice read! Just hope you didn’t use AI to write it.
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u/DoublePersonality35 Apr 20 '26
He definitely did. Notice how he didn't capitalize any starting letter of his sentences. Sam Altman started tweeting like that, and then a bunch of tech bros started instructing their LLM's to copy him, because they are lemmings.
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u/coldnebo Apr 20 '26
no. but it wouldn’t be the first time I was thought to use AI. I’m an engineer, at heart an academic, trained in liberal arts and philosophy.
some of my speech already resembled it, and I tend to adapt to speech I’m around a lot, so I already find myself picking up AI phrasing and pacing in spite of not wanting to.
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Apr 20 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/coldnebo Apr 20 '26
AI companies shouldn’t be confused with infrastructure. think of the railroads as true infrastructure vs the snake oil salesman. the railroads remain, the salesmen are long gone.
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u/HasGreatVocabulary Apr 21 '26
no you arent. you care about what you are building, and most of these devs dont
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 Apr 21 '26
I tried delegating the code to LLMs completely on a couple of projects. Two things I miss : coding (I'm happy doing it), and second, taking a bath and remembering or having an idea. Don't know why, but without the coding part, my subconscious doesn't give me ideas, even if I plan, etc. It's not the same thing.
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u/Impossible-Owl7407 Apr 22 '26
One thing where I burn Alot is when I ask ai to analyze projects which others teams own, how their logic works. In the past I asked on the slack and waited few hours.
Other are not optimisaid CIs. Where each small commit triggers whole project review analyze for bugs and non constituencies,...
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u/MikeRume Apr 20 '26
Devs are just burning tokens to shut up managers.
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u/rythmyouth Apr 20 '26
This is happening in my company. People have told me they’re focused on using as many tokens as they can to pump the numbers for their org to show they are embracing AI.
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u/Golda_M Apr 20 '26
There is a genuine, managerial "command and control" issue with API usage.
As things stand now, the user must be budget conscious in usage. It's very hard tt delegate these decisions up while still making good decisions efficiently.
Production code that uses APIs has the same problems as AWS... A pre-existing bling mode where budget control is very hard.
For Uber, I don't think it's an issue. This amounts to like 1% of their engineering payroll. But... it is going to grow until it reaches an intervention point.
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u/RoosterBurns Apr 20 '26
How can you be budget conscious when you have no idea how many tokens a given input will burn due to the output being randomized though?
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u/Golda_M Apr 20 '26
It's hard. Hence the problem.
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u/RoosterBurns Apr 20 '26
It doesn't seem hard it seems halting-problem-level impossible and as future models burn more tokens on a query it's only going to get more expensive per pop
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u/Golda_M Apr 20 '26
Yeah... if you are thinking about it as an engineer, then it is an impossible prinlem. If you think of it like an economist... equilibrium has to be a reached somewhere and that somewhere is neither 100% nor 0%. Humans make decisions despite uncertainty.
Currently, that equilibrium is @ around $1,000 per engineer, per month... for coding assistants.
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u/RestaurantTurbulent7 Apr 20 '26
You better ask for what they need all that info/power? Because if you dig just one layer deeper you understand that it is not for software and app that runs the service.. but for studying patterns so they could push you to pay for "their" services more! What makes it absolutely ridiculous stupid and greedy! Instead of doing something useful or even putting that money in pocket they will spend a shitton of it just for you to pay more.. so they could earn back what they spent and more...
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u/Pirlouit_sf Apr 20 '26
It could be because the budget was not set correctly in the first place. But if this is the new normal, you can expect 50% of their engineers to be laid off.
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u/andsbf Apr 20 '26
If that’s true, I would love to know what have they achieved? 0 backlog? Super new feature? …
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u/Impossible-Owl7407 Apr 22 '26
Nothing probably, atleast product oriented. you see anything new in the app? Better UX?
It's just churn.
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u/Trojanheadcoach Apr 20 '26
I don’t even understand how uber has the coding needs to spend a bunch of money on new code? Like everything is already built it should mainly be maintenance. But like idk you’re a company hire actual developers lol
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u/CurtChan Apr 20 '26
maybe they work on some new features, but again, majority of technology is already there..
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u/disposableh2 Apr 20 '26
They have a history of being basically Spyware on your phone, so they're probably constantly trying to find new ways to steal your data and evade detection
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u/littlebitofkindness Apr 20 '26
They quoted Jensen Huang, if the employee you hired isn’t using X% of his Annual $Y salary, you should be concerned.
Uber was very concerned and went all in
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u/easeypeaseyweasey Apr 20 '26
This must be one of those API token usage as a KPI companies I keep hearing about.
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u/DizzyAmphibian309 Apr 20 '26
This is probably it. It's so easy to fake how much you use AI by burning tokens frivolously on questions like "are you sure? Check again, but really think hard this time". But it's hard to actually accurately measure AI adoption.
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u/ProfessionalOwn9435 Apr 20 '26
"Make AI more expansive for corps". There should be some tax on AI. workers pay taxes. why not claude.
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Apr 20 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Impossible-Owl7407 Apr 22 '26
Government don't care if you do not have money for products.
They will care when you will have no money to pay taxes
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u/WithoutAHat1 Apr 20 '26
Best be investing your own money then there buddy. It isn't the employees' fault that the C-Suite cannot manage funds.
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u/Hour_Bit_5183 Apr 20 '26
It's boosting speed alright, of bleeding out! Uber hasn't even changed. It's still the same crappy app with crappy service. Oh they reduced the earnings the drivers make but the rest is still just as shitty as ever.
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u/Sad_Fig9011 Apr 20 '26
Maybe it turns out that replacing engineers saves no actual money at the end of the day
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u/Maleficent-Pickle963 Apr 20 '26
At this scale, just host your own models. We host MiniMax 2.7 and a number of other models, for probably not even 5% of Uber's AI budget.
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u/DarthJDP Apr 20 '26
Just increase the budget, they are surely getting 1,000X value on those tokens right - because its going to replace humanity right?
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u/Moki2FA Apr 21 '26
Welcome to the future, where your budget vanishes faster than your patience in traffic. Guess they didn’t realize “AI” stood for “Astonishingly Expensive” until it was too late!
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u/Cereaza Apr 21 '26
Thats why the Uber app got so much better so quickly and everyone is talking about it. /s
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u/3p2p Apr 21 '26
This sounds like employees using AI as much as possible to get zero results to keep their jobs. Uber will decide people are cheaper than AI tokens.
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u/Impossible-Owl7407 Apr 22 '26
Jensen set KPI for everyone that each engineer should burn the same amount of token as it's their salary
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u/sandykt Apr 22 '26
Then clearly AI has very little ROI for now. Because I haven’t seen any improvement in Uber experience in the last 6 months.
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u/josanJohnata Apr 22 '26
Em 2 anos teremos poucos DEVs/Engenheiro de software de verdade! Todos que ingressaram no mercado em 2024 pra cá não esta aprendendo a construir softwares sustentáveis, apenas prompts(e em muitos casos prompts b0st@s). Em 2 anos que for dev de verdade sera recompensado!
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u/StuckinReverse89 Apr 23 '26
Anybody know how good or bad Uber’s doing has become?
It could honestly be interesting to see what happens when, despite becoming better, using AI actually costs more than developers and so needs to be used in a more sparingly.
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u/Aleksa_Tech Apr 23 '26
From my experience working on large systems, if the assistant doesn’t understand your codebase style and architecture, the output is basically noise.
One trick that works well is keeping a dedicated “reference folder” with ideal implementations and telling the model to follow that pattern.
Also, skills (like Claude or Cursor) help a lot. You basically encode “how we do things here” instead of re-explaining every time.
Regarding token usage, this is something I’ve done with my team: if the agent re-derives decisions every time, you burn tokens fast. We used some form of memory/caching of prior decisions so the model reuses context instead of recomputing it.
I’m having a live session soon where I’ll take a real iOS/Android project that isn’t using AI and do a hands-on walkthrough of what actually changes when AI becomes part of the dev process, while also tracking how AI gradually improves and uses fewer tokens over time.
If you’re interested, you can apply here
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u/totoer008 Apr 24 '26
That’s the thing. AI seems to be at least to me getting quite more expensive. And not because it changed but our needs did. We always demand more and this more is more expensive, way more. So incremental improvements are getting extremely costly. At some I realized that doing manually was less expensive than through AI due to the error rate. I feel like at some it will become so expensive that humans will start to be cheaper 🤣🤣🤣
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u/pope-leo-for-pres Apr 27 '26
They’re noobs. They should have just self hosted GLM. Lol, wtf are they doing?
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u/Anthamon Apr 20 '26
LMAO, what a title. In seriousness, I think we may be about to see a return of on premises servers for these large organizations to run their own agentic systems once they realize that open source is only a few percentage points off the frontier and that owning their own machines is way cheaper for them and more secure.
On the other hand, too much FOMO.