Uber Boss Can’t Tell If The AI Was Worth It After Blowing 2026 Token Budget In Just Four Months
Uber's COO Andrew Macdonald expressed uncertainty about the value of the company's significant investment in AI tools. Despite spending billions, he noted a lack of clear benefits linking costs to useful features for consumers. This skepticism comes as Uber has already exhausted its entire AI budget for 2026 in just four months.
- ▪Uber's COO stated that there is currently no clear connection between rising AI costs and useful consumer features.
- ▪The company spent its entire AI budget for 2026 within four months due to unexpected usage and costs.
- ▪Uber invested $3.4 billion in AI research and development in 2025.
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| Original publisher | Kotaku |
| Canonical URL | https://kotaku.com/uber-boss-cant-tell-if-the-ai-was-worth-it-after-blowing-2026-token-budget-in-just-four-months-2000699537 |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 21:00:04 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T21:07:54.543Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T21:07:54.543Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Kww-a5y3F_cQ |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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Uber Boss Can’t Tell If The AI Was Worth It After Blowing 2026 Token Budget In Just Four Months After years of telling investors and customers that AI was the future, one tech giant leader is sounding a lot less sure about all those burned billions AIClaudegenerative AIUber By Zack Zwiezen Published May 26, 2026 | Comments (0) | 𝕏 Copied! © Anucha Naisuntorn (Shutterstock) In a recent interview, Uber president and chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald seemed unsure that it made sense for the company to continue to spend billions of dollars on AI tools, such as Claude coding, as there doesn’t seem to be a “link” between the rising costs of the tech and actually getting anything useful from it. On May 22, as spotted by The Verge, Macdonald was interviewed by Rapid Response on YouTube.
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