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Comment by TheqO | Hacker News Reader

It's a solid sign the numbers are not real...

What Uber and other companies said is that the money they spent didn't generate the expected value they were promised. If it had generated $2 for every $1 spent, then Uber would be spending with no limits.

The lack of demonstrable return on investment means there is a ceiling to the market size, and profit is capped as cheaper models and self hosted open source models limit the amount flagship models can charge.

Long way to go till market saturation though so they will grow for foreseeable, but its a quandary of how much they spend on R&D vs giving future shareholders dividends.

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If Uber think there's no ROI, why do they allow each of their employees to spend $1,500 per month per tool?

Shouldn't they have set that per-employee budget to zero instead?

(I dug up the original source for that Uber doubts the ROI story a few months ago, it's a lot weaker than the headlines about it suggested: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/#th...)

I didn't mean 'no ROI', clearly AI is a productivity boost.

For the AI companies to IPO at the money they want, they have to promise that they are going to be worth many multiples more of that value.

But currently they are spending hundreds of billions and despite this their models are not light years ahead of each other, or of the companies with much lower budgets and compute power.

What they claim they can offer in future profits is subject to considerable debate.

It's in the interests of VC's and their underlying rich investors to hype it ip, IPO and bank the cold hard cash.

Yeah, I agree with all of that.

If Uber caps employee AI spend at $1500, then they've just admitted per employee AI spend on par with premium health care or commercial rent both in the 1000-1500 range, and this limited to just technical employees, i.e. subsect so presumably AI as % of business cost even lower. Health insurance 1T industry... commercial RE like 100 billion...

Anthropic thinks it's worth more than insuring all US workers AND putting roof over their heads. AI sector thinks its worth magnitude more in aggregate. If they fully displace people, i.e. untied to headcount eventually then sure, but if not, based on what Uber pays, AI is basically worth as much as insurance.

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