Comment by jujube3

Uber's not really a good example because they deliberately incentivized their engineers to spend as many tokens as possible, which was silly. But even assuming that every developer uses the full $1,500 a month of tokens that they are now allowing, that's actually not a lot of money relative to the cost of a single developer for them. It's less than 1/10 of a junior engineer's fully loaded salary.

Where I would expect to see people invest in local models is in cases where a company has regulatory requirements to keep data local, or where they're doing some specialized kind of work. Neither of those really apply to Uber. In 2026, it would absolutely be irresponsible for a taxi company to try to build a better Claude than Claude.

Now what this looks like 5 or 10 years from now, it's hard to say. A lot will depend on whether China keeps releasing open weight models and whether people can still run those open weight models on commercially available hardware.