Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

Uber just admitted the quiet part out loud: after burning through its yearly artificial intelligence budget in only four months, the company is struggling to prove that all that spending is actually making the app better for normal people. Uber president Andrew Macdonald said there’s still no clear line between rising AI use and more useful features for customers. That landed like catnip for skeptics, especially after Uber also said it has been hiring fewer humans while pouring more money into AI.

And the comment section? Brutal. One of the biggest moods was basically: if riders can’t feel any difference, where did the money go? One user dryly noted they still get picked up “the same way,” which became the thread’s unofficial punchline. Another brought in Jurassic Park energy, joking that companies were so busy asking whether they could make coding bots work all day that they forgot to ask whether they should. In plain English: if an AI is constantly churning out code, maybe the real problem is that the work process has gone off the rails.

There was also some classic internet side-eye about incentives. One commenter invoked Goodhart’s law — the idea that when people are judged by a number, they start gaming the number — suggesting engineers may have been pushed to burn through AI usage because management was obsessed with the metric itself. Even a calmer voice saying cheaper AI might last longer if big companies slow down still sounded like a warning siren: the community mood is clear — show people the benefits, or stop setting cash on fire.