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

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

    Share.
    View 41 Comments

    41 Comments

    1. Haunterblademoi on

      They miscalculated their expenses, and then realized that AI is too expensive.

    3. your_catfish_friend on

      You can’t put a price tag on a good Al.

      Alfred, Albert, Weird Al; doesn’t matter. Priceless.

    4. Anxious_Equipment144 on

      The question that people are starting to ask (and probably should’ve years ago) is whether AI is revolutionary or evolutionary, and, well, unfortunately it’s becoming increasingly clear it’s the latter.

    5. TT5i0 on

      Sounds like they will be doing layoffs soon so they can allocate more to the AI budget

    6. Wizmaxman on

      We are either at the peak or close to the peak of how good the models are vs the price we pay.

      Soon the costs will go up and that will only be for access to cheaper models. The good models will be even higher.

      This whole thing is not sustainable.

      No one is going to want to pay 10x-20x the price for models that still make mistake and are slop cannons.

    8. OuterSpaceBootyHole on

      Spectacular example of businesses dramatically increasing their expenses in an attempt to penny pinch. They already had a finely tuned business model that extracted the most amount of profit in the sleaziest ways possible and it still wasn’t enough. Over 10% of their code output had no human supervision and it made them burn through a year’s worth of cash in a third of the time. They’ve possibly introduced vulnerabilities with no cost savings to show for it.

      TL, DR: Lmao get fucked

    9. whiskeytown79 on

      Companies: Use more AI! You should be using more tokens! More more more!

      Developers: *Use more tokens*

      Companies: *ShockedPikachu.jpg*

    10. S7AR4RGD on

      The greatest scam ever pulled was convincing these ignoble kunths that the workers can be replaced by large language models.

    11. marvinfuture on

      Just wait until AI isn’t subsidized and it’s astronomically more expensive when required by investors to turn a profit

    12. No-Snow-7618 on

      it’s ok— we’ve 10x productivity— right????

      /s in case people actually still need it

    13. NachoWindows on

      I’ve been burning our AI budget and almost at 90% used…and it’s May.
      Now imagine everyone doing the same. The company is pushing everyone to adopt and use it. Now they’re learning the cost.

    14. thedoommerchant on

      Burn it all down. People did their job just fine before AI showed up.

    15. NorCalJason75 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.** 

      So, leadership says “here guys, use this in your work. See how it goes”. Employees use it extensively, but it doesn’t save leadership any money?

      Sounds like AI is a waste of time…

    19. NUMBerONEisFIRST on

      AI is artificially priced cheap right now so everyone gets locked into a use case, and then they can start charging the true rates they need to charge to make any of their investment back.

      The only people desperate enough to try going with AI seem to be greedy CEOs who are learning through the process some refer to as: FAFO

    21. rnicoll on

      Of all the companies I can’t care about being surprised that prices go up once the VC funding dries up, Uber is definitely at the top/bottom depending how you look at it.

    24. blackwave-- on

      My company is heavily invested in the AI agenda because the CTO went for a lunch with other CTOs of nearby companies and now they are all measuring their AI-penises.

      This is what’s happening on global scale.

    25. Friendly-Shirt-9177 on

      burned the 2026 budget by april and now theyre acting surprised. classic “move fast” until the invoice shows up

    26. rgvtim on

      From my experience with AI, i can definitely see this happening. You are looking at problems to solve and you can do it two ways, .

      First let AI just do it, hook the data up to the AI, give it some instructions and let it go. Its often quick and out the door, results are often a bit sketch, but you probably met the schedule deadline.

      Second you can use the AI to help write the code to do the analysis., but in the end AI is not involved. It takes longer, requires more skilled people to write good prompts, developers to guide/fix the output, QA folks to test the code. Its a longer cycle, you are probably going to be pushing whatever schedule was put in place by the folks hyping AI, but in the end you have a product that works, runs fast and for much less recurring cost that the AI.

      If I were a betting man, I would bet Uber went with the first option.

    27. h4ck3r_n4m3 on

      Who would have guessed that incentivizing people to burn tokens would cost a lot of money

    28. Embarrassed_Quit_450 on

      Not the first time Uber goes 500 km/h towards a wall. There were stories about how Uber was proud to have thousands of microservices. Inevitably there were follow up stories about how their cloud expenses were out of control and they merged a bunch of services together.

    29. Cryogenicist on

      How the F does uber spend so much money??! Their app works already. WTf are they doing?

    31. Meatslinger on

      Given that countless studies have shown that AI is in fact, almost always not worth it, this is the epitome of an unforced error.

    32. spazz720 on

      This is the mistake of poor leadership not understanding what AI actually is. Incentivizing ai usage instead of having their employees utilize its implementation when needed. The old “we’ve invested in this so everyone use it to justify our work !”

    33. AcousticOnomatopoeia on

      Uber’s always been stupid and unprofitable, then they used stupid unprofitable AI, well now they’re super stupid and super unprofitable.

    37. georgikgxg on

      What are they developing? Where are they expanding? 

      What new features come to uber, the app that serves my destination to a list of drivers chosen by proximity through an already established algorithm, to drive me through the city following a route calculated through an already developed algorithm, on an open source map they pay kack shit, and for this service I pay money calculate through a simple multiplication ?

      Bullshit man

    39. nx6 on

      If he’s questioning the value of AI at all in his business he already sounds smarter than a lot of other C-suite execs.

    41. Fluffcake on

      “AI” is a dead end word salad generator and code autocomplete with limited use cases. It was a billion dollar idea that a bunch of clowns mistook for a trillion dollar idea, and promptly wasted trillions on it…