Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in 4 months

Fucking gross trying to make people think the site crashed to trick people into turning off their adblocker .

blowing the budget is their own damn fault. they put up a leaderboard, ffs.

even ranked their internal usage competitively on internal leader boards,

Sounds like an opportunity for workers to sabotage the system by using AI too much without increasing productivity. Let the assholes figure it out for themselves.

Meanwhile…

You know what’s crazy is we’re still in the “charge not enough to make money” phase of these VC backed startups trajectory. It’s gonna be wild when we aren’t in the “hook the users with unrealistic token prices” phase.

site is dead with adblock, before anyone bothers to visit it

shitty website = downvote

Oh thats sad. Wouldn’t have wished it on a better corporation…

Lol

Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in 4 months

AI is getting expensive, and some companies are cutting back on usage in an attempt to moderate costs. That cohort includes Uber, which recently instituted internal usage caps as a way to cut down on its exorbitant AI spend.

Bloomberg reports that the company has instituted a new rule that places a monthly $1,500 cap per employee and per agentic coding tool, including Anthropic’s Claude Code or Cursor. The usage is trackable via an internal dashboard that each employee has access to, although — in certain cases — the caps can be exceeded with permission, the company says.

The news is perhaps not too surprising, since, in April, the company’s CTO revealed that the ridesharing giant had blown through its entire annual AI budget in a matter of four months. That appears to have occurred after Uber encouraged staff to use AI “as much as possible” and even ranked their internal usage competitively on internal leader boards, The Information previously reported.

Uber’s COO, Andrew Macdonald, also recently cast doubt on AI’s productivity impact, noting during a podcast appearance that “it’s very hard to draw a line” between AI usage and new consumer features.

Uber’s cutback raises a broader issue that the tech industry is currently facing: As enterprises pour money into AI, where exactly is the return on investment? Indeed, AI ROI has so far remained a largely theoretical phenomenon that everybody hopes will eventually materialize — although some companies are obviously getting a little restless while they wait.

I guess more AI doesn’t mean more productivity. Who could’ve imagined?

Use AI as much as possible. You will be juged on your usage. No wait, not that much. This shit is expensive.

This is what you get for jumping on the bandwagon without even seeing where it is going.

I love the smell of bursting bubbles in the morning.

If I ever worked at a company that required using as much AI as possible, I’d just make a script that automatically sent API requests in the background at random intervals. Could just have a file full of questions vaguely related to my job that were copied from forums and pull one randomly for each request.