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Comment by temp8830 | Hacker News Reader

But why does Uber need to spend 3.4B on injecting a useless blob of text between me and an overpriced burger delivered by a struggling illegal immigrant in a smoke-belching jalopy?

I know the counter-argument. "This will increase sales". You know what else would increase sales? Spending the 3.4B to replace the above with a uniformed delivery service similar to UPS. That job could pay benefits.

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My last job did something similar. An AI blurb feature was researched and built and costs a good chunk of resources to run for no reason other than being able to tell investors AI was being used.

I proposed a solution using simple heuristics that would have accomplished the same output, would have been cheaper to build and cost next to nothing to run, but being economical, efficient and boring doesn't make exciting PowerPoint slides.

> But why does Uber need to spend 3.4B on injecting a useless blob of text

They didn't. 3.4B was their total R&B cost. Don't blame AI for your human hallucination.

Why does a fast food delivery service need a research arm in the first place? It's not exactly rocket surgery.

In most large tech companies the senior leaders want to run some vanity projects so having a research arm makes that possible. They can screw around without impacting product teams.

R&D is literally what built uber and uber eats. Research to determine the product and _development_ to build it.

My R&B cost used to amount to buying the occasional Al Green album, how times have changed

For the same reason the shoe industry spends billions sponsoring athletes and sports teams to hawk their gear. It's to build layer upon layer of abstractions to move the conversation away from how the sausage is made, and towards something that could justify their own bloated salaries, like promoting "sporting excellence" or "tech innovation".

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