Comment by internetter
2 days ago
I know I'm responding to AI right now, but
> which means figuring out if the company can afford this level of productivity at scale.
If it was actually productive, then the revenue would increase and affordability wouldn't be a question.
Yes, my thoughts exactly. Productivity by definition creates things, hopefully valuable things. Is all the extra burn on chatbots worth the cost? Has Uber somehow gotten dramatically more efficient and effective due to this massive budget overrun? Or have they just given people shiny and expensive ways to push the same work around?
> If it was actually productive, then the revenue would increase and affordability wouldn't be a question.
Revenue has increased. Have you seen Meta's latest earnings? +33% revenue - in this economy.
Affordability is not a question. There is a reason companies like Meta have no issue with their engineers spending $1k/day on tokens. It's just not that much compared to how much they make per employee.
How can that be attributed to any code an LLM wrote?
>$8 billion of net income was the result of a tax benefit the company realized in the first quarter of the year.
So exactly how much of their revenue is because of any code LLMs wrote vs. just structural tail winds?
You can always say "it's not because of LLMs", that's nearly unfalsifiable.
But if all of your peers are saying LLMs are more productive, if you're building things faster than ever before, the macro picture speaks for itself.
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I agree that you can't draw any conclusions about AI, but their revenue increased by 33% percent. That's just straight income before any taxes or costs are applied.
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After losing 20 million users? https://www.theverge.com/tech/921089/meta-earnings-q1-2026-u...
I really don't understand their economics.
This article is about Uber, not Meta
That means absolutely nothing in the context of this conversation. It says right in their release ad impressions are up almost 20% and cost per add is up 12%. Those two metrics alone account for most of the increase in their revenue. Absolutely no conclusion can be drawn regarding the impact of AI on those numbers one way or the other.
It's not like they used AI to crank out some new revenue generating piece of software, or massively reduce operating costs. In fact their operating costs rose by 35%.
> It says right in their release ad impressions are up almost 20% and cost per add is up 12%
Have you wondered why this is the case? How do you think they increased impressions so much at their scale? How they did this despite losing 20M users?
To put it clearly, AI at every part of the pipeline: writing software, product features/experiments, A/B testing them, and pushing them out to users. Even before you get to something like LLM driven recommendations, you can virtually entirely automate the process of finding more "engagement alpha" with AI.
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Not every change a developer makes increases revenue, and the changes that do often have a lag time.
I'd argue it's often the contrary -- since it's easy to ship features and fixes, people often ship things without questioning if it makes business sense to support a use case, or if the design is solid. Now you have exactly the same revenge but more things to maintain
What if you're the SRE and the code fixes mean the site goes from 99% uptime to 99.9% up? How do you measure the revenue from that?
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This is my thought too. The eggheads in accounting set budgets, and we produce products within that budget. I could be twice as productive with twice as many people, and maybe 50% more productive with good AI, but if it's not budgeted for it's an issue (especially short-term before the product is released).
Steelmanning the other side: a counter example would be if competitors use the same tools to achieve the same productivity gains.
> If it was actually productive
They are extremely productive if you use them right. To the point it worries me how clever these pseudo-AI models can get in the next year.
That is not true at all. No matter how "productive" a company is means nothing if people aren't buying your product. And using LLMs to be more productive will not convince anyone to buy your product. Human creativity and intuition to make a product that people want to use is what sells. Productivity for productivity's sake doesn't really move the needle at all, and can make things worse.