Why Uber is Going ALL IN On AI Right Now (It's Not What You Think)

So Uber gave 5,000 engineers— so Uber gave 5,000 engineers access to Claude Code in December. By February, usage had nearly doubled. By April, the CTO told the company they burned through the entire annual AI budget. So the adoption curve tells you everything about what happened. In December 2024, 32% of Uber's engineers were using Claude Code. By February 2026, that number was 63%. That seems a little slow to me. But anyway, that's not a gradual rollout. That's a product so useful that engineers pulled it into their workflow faster than finance could model the spend. Okay, that's a lot of employees though. Yeah. Uber has about 34,000 employees and engineering is roughly 15% of that. Okay, so all this to say, Neil, is this CTO— if I go back over here, so look, AI-related costs at Uber are up 6x since 2024. This is what we're talking about, and we're seeing this in our organization, yours too. Um, CTO Praveen Nepali Naga's quote was, I'm back to the drawing board. That's the CTO of a $144 billion company admitting that the tools work so well that his team can't afford to keep using them at this rate. So here's the thing. So he has to go back to his CFO and ask for a larger budget now. But to Neil's point, if this is working for you so well, you should be spending more. And here's the other thing. You might be thinking, oh, I can put this all on open source tokens. But if you're actively building things and shipping code, you can't put it on open source tokens because you might need to rework it a couple of times and the time you spent there is not worth it. Chances are if you're shipping a lot of this stuff, a lot of it's going to have to be on frontier models.

So, and there's an important thing here. They rolled this out in December, and by February they had good adoption. By April they went through all their tokens. I bet you there's a lot of terrible usage of Claude Code within this organization. I don't mean in a bad way. It's actually in almost all organizations where they're doing a lot of things inefficiently and they're not optimizing for cost savings. That'll start coming out soon where companies start thinking about it. And then his budget from April will last the whole year and he won't need to go back to the CFO.

We'll see. I mean, so it says the CFO problem here is now the bottleneck of AI adoption at enterprise level. The technology works, productivity gains are real. Uber's own data says 75% of code review comments are marked helpful by engineers. Okay, there's your thing, Neal. 75% are helpful. The constraint is that the traditional annual budgeting was designed for tools with predictable per-seat costs, and AI coding agents have usage curves that look like cloud compute bills from 2015. exponential until someone notices. Every enterprise CTO is about to have the same meeting. The tools are too good to pull back. The costs are too unpredictable to ignore. And the companies that figure out token cost optimization first will have a structural advantage over every competitor still running annual budget cycles. I'll tell you something, Neil. We've been playing around with token optimization this week just on my own stuff. I'm trying all the models, right? Gemma 4, Quin, which is from Alibaba. I'm trying all these other ones. They're decent, but they're still nothing close to what you get with Claude.

Well, on our end, we're— so let's look at it from a business standpoint. We tend to create a lot of tools for marketing-related purposes, all right? For ourselves, our clients, or, you know, just putting out there because tools get you more brand mentions, build more links. So we use Claude quite a bit. What we've found is our outputs are similar, and I don't know exactly what my team is using, but I saw a report on this. We're down 21% in cost because we've been optimizing for efficiencies. So 21% savings over the last 30 days is huge. And I bet you as time goes forward, not only will the models get cheaper, but people will come up with solutions for optimization because this is a big problem. And I bet you our bill a year from now will be maybe like 25% of what it is today on a monthly basis.

So I'll give you guys some practical things you can do, and I'll give you my thoughts on this, Neil. So You guys can all use OpenRouter. So OpenRouter will help you route to the right models and they'll save— it'll help you save a lot of money. They take 5% of the, the, this basically the spend because you're, you're routing everything through them, right? Um, that's one thing you can do. You can buy local infrastructure. So the reason why I bought these DGX Sparks is to see kind of how local inference will work, and then we're going to consider buying more and more. Um, the thing is, Neil, I think we're going to token optimize. I think I mentioned it last time, maybe 75-80% goes through it, maybe, maybe for open models and then 15-20% on frontier, which is like, when I say frontier, I mean, you know, you're using Claude Opus, like the latest version, right? Or using Mythos when it comes out. I think, Neil, the costs are going to come down, but what's going to happen is usage is going to skyrocket even more. And so what ends up happening is costs still keep going up because the usage is still unpredictable. And because I see my team using it now, the ones that are getting pilled by it, they're like, we need more, we need more, because they see how I'm using it and they start to use it that way. They're like, oh my God, right? I'm like, oh my God. If they even start using it even like 25% in the way I use it right now, my costs still go up exponentially.

Yeah, but I don't look at costs going up exponentially because at the same time, even though the models are becoming cheaper and cheaper, you're going to have it to a certain point where some of the older models are good enough for a lot of tasks and you won't be using as many frontier models. So that I think will save a lot. B, and this is the big one, No business really cares about the cost if the work is actually producing a direct ROI. So if they're able to— if they grow their cost by 10x for that department, but their profitability and their revenue grows in total, a business is happy. Look, if you're publicly traded and you spent too much on AI credit, but you can show, hey, we were predicting 20% growth in revenue and we actually hit 28%, and I know our profit for the quarter was supposed to be $1 billion, But we have the same amount of people. Yes, we use AI more, and due to the revenue increase, our profitability was actually $1.2 billion. The market will reward you and your stock goes up. No one really cares if you're spending more if you can produce more.

I just think this, and this actually, I have a thing that ties in with this. I just think we're all going to be producing a lot more. Just looking at how I work, you might say you don't work that hard. I still think you work really hard right now. But I think the way we— I think we're just going to end up doing more. So let me share this with you real quick, 'cause I've kind of said this before, Neil, on this podcast. I think there's going to be net new, there's going to be more entrepreneurs in the world because you can do so much now. So this guy from Deal, remember Deal, the one that did the spy with Rippling?

Oh yeah, the company that you can use to, I think it's like pay employees internationally or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they're a good company, but they did that whole spy thing. So he said P. Marca. So P. Marca is Marc Andreessen, Oh, look, hey, look, I'm cool with these guys. I'm homies. So look at this. So when a company becomes more productive, this is from Alex Boaz, I don't know how to pronounce it. So when a company becomes more productive, it doesn't sit still. It goes after more customers, enters new markets, builds new products. Productivity gives you leverage and leverage makes you want to do more, not less. Exactly what I just said. So no CEO in history has looked at a more productive team and said, great, let's shrink. They hire more. That's what we're seeing in our data. So we also tend to forget that new tech creates new jobs and industries. A job title that didn't exist now demands 70K people, 283% year on year. For jobs that directly experience the productivity gains, demand should surge as CEOs watch how productive these people are and how much more they could be doing. So if you see this over here, Neil, you want to read it?

Uh, so AI trainers outpacing every job in 2025 at 283% growth. I can't— I can read 20.

Yeah, I'll call out the rest, Neil. So, um, thank you for reading that part. So 2025 starts, you have 18,000 AI trainers employed globally. Now that's 70,000. But I, you know, I never even thought about this. Like, you're gonna need more AI trainers, obviously, right? Um, AI engineers and PM roles are actually up 400%. So you have 15,000 OpenAI, uh, engineering jobs— not the company, just OpenAI jobs— on an 1,135 open, um, AI product manager jobs. So it's going up, right? So I think Neil, we're going to see more entrepreneurs, and then I think people are going to realize that creation gives them a sense of meaning and purpose, and they're going to want to do more of it. And I think we're just going to want more and more and more, Neil. That being said, I don't disagree with you that for more basic tasks like doing 1 1, maybe that's going to be free or close to free. But I think we're always like maybe 10 to 20% of the time, you're still always trying to build new stuff, and that still eats up a lot of budget because you still want the smartest models.

Yeah, so I'm in Brazil right now as we're recording this, and yesterday I was at a really large publicly traded company's office in Brazil. They're global. To give you perspective, they own 3 floors of an office space. They're not the biggest floors, they're normal size, like, you know, just good-sized buildings, but they have 3 floors, or that's what they take up. I don't know how much they spent on their new office. If I had to guess, $50-ish million. Okay. Which is really, that's a lot of money for like decorations and technology and all that kind of stuff. Right. And I'm in Brazil. So if you take the currency exchanger, that's roughly like $250 million USD equivalent. That's a lot of money because remember, people get paid less in Brazil as well. So for a company to spend around $250 million in their currency and employees get paid proportionally, like US employee getting $100 grand, they get 100 reais, so that would be like $20,000 US. And I was talking to the whole marketing team and we were talking about strategy for Brazil as well as global strategy. And the one thing that's consistent with them and almost every other company I talked to, no one's thinking about shrinking or laying off employees in marketing or anywhere else. Everyone's talking about, hey, everyone's using AI, it's causing companies to move faster, we need to move faster. How do we adopt these tools in the correct way to be more effective? How do we focus on the right KPIs so that way we actually see revenue growth and not just increased costs in AI and no change in the top line? But everyone has this mentality that we've been seeing recently because if you go back a year, Eric, I think you'll agree with this. Everyone's like, oh my God, doom and gloom. Everyone's going to start getting laid off. Tons of jobs are going to be displaced, at least in the corporate world. We're not talking about flipping burgers or stuff like that. Even in the corporate world, people were afraid of that. But we're seeing the opposite. We're not seeing sales reps get canceled, marketing employees get canceled. We're seeing them stay roughly the same, sometimes even increase. But everyone's like, how do you get 2x the output and productive output? Productive output doesn't mean, oh, they did 2x more work. It's more so they did 2x more stuff that actually moves the bottom line or the top line.

Yeah.

And that's what we're seeing. And if you don't keep up with the competitors, you're going to Lose. So you can't actually cut, you just got to figure out how to move faster with what you have.

You're not using your microphone.

I'm not.

That's right. Okay, anyway, Neil's gonna get cut. So, okay, so, um, I want to know what happened.

What? So I had, uh, on my last trip coming back from Crown, I keep it in my bag. So I have protein powder in my bag. Okay, like, literally, I, I, you know, travel with protein powder. Yeah, like vegan protein.

Show the brand. That's Legion, right?

Yeah, it's Legion.

We should, we should give a shout out to Legion. There you go.

Great product. Okay. So I didn't know that they had to check it. Like they checked to see if there's powder. Yeah. I had my mic on top. The rep pulled it out and then boom, it hit the ground and it got messed up. So I ordered a new one from Amazon, but I was pissed, but what can I do? You know, it's like, you can't be like, hey, TSA rep, you owe me a mic.

You know what's funny? Sometimes I would get pulled aside from TSA and they'd take the mic out. I get stopped for the mic because they think it's a grenade.

Yeah, I don't get the grenade. They would tell me, because you know when they say take all electronic devices out, I would say maybe like 30-40% of the time they stop my bag and they're like, you didn't take out your technology. And I'm like, it's a microphone, you just said laptops. But electric toothbrush, they never make me take out. But for some reason, the mic, it gets flagged.

Yeah, the mic gets flagged quite often. Anyway, real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com, check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan. So Neil, I think I have one point to bring up, but it'll come back to me. So I want to bring up these charts over here. So these charts are from Coatue. We've, we've kind of covered them before, but I think it's worth bringing it up because The key thing here is, will AI lead to mass unemployment? Oh, I remember what I was going to say. So the way I think we might measure— this is going to be an experiment for us, Neil. So the way we're going to measure AI adoption is we have Claude teams right now. We can see usage in Claude Code. We can see usage in Claude Cowork. So we want to see—

Yeah.

One, we want to see usage, but we also want to see the pull requests coming from GitHub. Now, those 2 things can be gamed. If you're just shipping a bunch of pull requests and you're just spending a lot, you could— it could be stupid spend, right, to Neil's point. So the thing that you saw earlier from Uber where they're, they're saying 75% of engineers said the code was helpful code, we might have something like that where the engineers or maybe the people, the managers are checking and saying, hey, like, you did all this, you're engaged, but what have you actually built? Can you screen share with us, right? So my point of saying this is that you can have these metrics that are maybe easy to record, but they might be easy to game. You need to have a pairing metric next to it to make sure that that what you're doing is actually quality and it's not just a bunch of slop, which is what my homepage got called, even though it converts. So yeah, anyway.

Eric's homepage was not slop. That's just what, again, what someone else thinks. I'm neutral. If his homepage was crap, I would tell him. Yes, is it perfect from a design perspective? No, but get it out there. Find out if the model works, if the marketing message, you know, converts, and then go and adjust it and fine-tune it later on once you figured out how to really make the funnel You know what I've learned from this, Neal, right now is when the—

like you and I, we grew up during the internet era, but we weren't exactly working at the time just yet. And what I've learned is when the demand is there, it doesn't matter. Like you're going to get pulled, the demand is going to pull you and like, who cares, right?

Yes.

So, okay, check this out. So this is done from CodeTwo. So literally they had a post about a month ago saying, will AI lead to mass unemployment? Okay. And so I just want to call out here, The ROI that we want to look at instead of return on investment, we want to look at return on displacement, ROP. Okay. So when you look at agriculture in 1900, 12 million agricultural workers, 41% of workforce, you go all the way to 1970, it's 2% of workforce, 3.5 million workers. But net-net, what happened was agriculture lost 8 million jobs from 1910 to 1970, and then new industries gained 46 million jobs. Okay. So 46 divided by 12 over there, 5x, right? So there you have it.

I see the same thing with engineering. A lot of like, if you go back to the Uber example—

Sorry, it's 46 divided by 8. Yeah, go ahead.

Still, it's amazing, right? But if you look at like the Uber example and how they're talking about 75% efficiencies, the, the, or 75% approval, like they found it being helpful. The first thing that comes to my mind is outside of cost. When you're using it, yes, you're releasing more, but is that releasing more improving LTV customer repeat visits or repeat usage, conversion rates, new potential onboarding or revenue, like all those kind of things. And what I believe is you'll end up seeing is you'll see some displacement because people are like, you're using all this AI stuff, do we actually need all these people? And B, I think you'll also see in addition to costs going down, people being like, you're using AI for all this stuff and this is great. And you did 50 things this month versus the normal 10, but out of the 50 things you did, only 6 of them actually helped drive a return. While normally when you do 10, 4 of them drive a return. So you did 50% more things on that end, but you did 5 times, 5x the amount of output. So then they start fine-tuning what things are being used for. And you're going to start seeing not as much usage in certain areas, more usage in others, employees getting displaced because they realize they don't need them all. And then some of those employees go on to other sectors, other fields, other jobs. And it's the same thing in marketing. Dude, the amount of customers that are asking us to build them agents right now is ridiculous. And it just goes to show people are like, oh, you're going to have to get rid of people. Well, we're at the same time, we're getting new requests that are requiring us to hire people or reshift.

We're replacing different So here's what I'll call it. I actually went and saw, guys, here's a free idea for you guys. So what Neil and I just said, this is a problem. We're all going to be spending more on tokens. We would like to track our return on token spend, our ROTs, return on token spend, okay? So if you can figure out, and I just went to my agent, I asked, hey, can you build something that tracks return on token spend? Because that is something we'd all spend on so we can optimize our costs, right? That's a smart idea. Someone take that idea. Neil will invest. I will co-invest with Neil. Um, I'm speaking for Neil here.

So anyway, I know, by the way, brilliant model.

You look at this, okay? By the way, Neil, remember, I think it was 98% of people used to be farmers, and then you go all the way to 2%. But this displacement took a long time, 1900 and 1970 or so. Okay, I'm not even done here. There's a— there's another one over here. Spreadsheets, for example. Okay, the return on displacement with spreadsheets. So people are like, oh my God, So bookkeepers, like you see this in the blue over here, it's going up and up. So bookkeepers, and then VisiCalc comes out, Lotus 1-2-3, remember that one? Excel. And then it's the bookkeepers start going down. But what happens? Accountants and auditors starts going up, and then financial analysts starts going up. So 400K bookkeepers disappeared at the advent of the spreadsheet era, but 1.3 million accountants and financial analysts were added. So we're going to be doing different things. And again, we've said this before, don't hire humans to do robot things. And more human tasks that we're used to are being taken over by robots, that's okay, 'cause nobody wanted to do those things in the beginning anyway.

Yeah.

I have one more, Neil.

Go for it, share the next one.

Here's one more. So, oh, by the way, look, New York Times in 1973 predicted ATMs would cut bank teller jobs by 75%. Instead, teller employment grew by 81% from 1970 to 1988. That's 'cause way more banks opened. Here's the other thing. Radiologists. Oh my God, 10 years ago, I think one of these AI speakers was like, radiologists, that job's going to go away. What happened? There's more demand than ever for radiologists. So I think, yes, I think short-term there's going to be job displacement for the people that don't pick it up. Those are the people that I'm sensationalist, that I'm talking about, that I am genuinely concerned for those people, right? Because there's going to be some short-term displacement. Long-term, that's why I keep saying, Neil's been saying this too, Everything's going to be okay because you see, you can see that history rhymes. It doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

Speaking of ATMs, it was funny on— I saw a lot of the original ATM ad campaigns from back in the day, but, you know, if you haven't, Google them, you'll see them. They're kind of entertaining. Do you even use ATMs yourself? Like, I never use them.

Only when I go to Vegas, when I lose money.

The fees are so high.

Yeah, but it's okay. I pay it anyway because I'm at Vegas.

I don't even have an ATM card because I'm worried about fraud.

You don't use an ATM, you just use your regular card. What do you mean? So, okay, this is when you're being degenerate like me. Guys, don't be like me, okay? So let's say you're gambling, for example. Your ATM card has a limit on it, so you don't use a debit card because there's a limit on it, right? And then you can call them to try to break your limit, but that's annoying. So what you do sometimes if you get desperate is you just do a cash advance with the card and you end up paying even a bigger fee.

So I have a credit card, I have an Amex. You're saying with the American Express, I can go to ATM and put it in and get money out?

So I know what, here, let me speak on a debit card. The debit card piece first. I know you can get a cash advance. I think you could do the same thing with a credit card too. But I, that if memory serves me right, I haven't done this for a while. This is only during my degenerate times when I gambled a lot.

So, but, and Eric's talking crap about himself. He's actually a very good gambler and overall has made money. He typically plays poker and he usually comes out winning.

No, but when I play stupid table games, I lose a lot. And this is back in, in our 20s or so, like you're, you're like, you're actually partying and drinking and stuff. being stupid. So like, you know, we don't do any of that anymore.

So yeah, Eric came and visited me in Vegas one time and we all did dinner with his friends in Aria. And I remember Eric was gambling because we were waiting on some of his friends and we were there early. And one of his friends comes to me, he's like, well, Eric just lost $5,000 at a table playing blackjack, right? And even though it sounds bad and a lot of people were shocked, his poker winnings more than make up for all his table game losses. He's actually very good at poker.

Poker, by the way, poker is great for business. You learn a lot from it. You know, remember your brother-in-law Heaton? So I was just talking about how poker has been so good for me and I tweeted it and he's like, while you're playing poker, I'm playing business. So Heaton tweeted that at me, right? I was like, oh, motherfucker, right? So that's part of my language. And so, you know what I did? I was like, well, Chamath doesn't think that. Chamath thinks it's good for business and da da da. And then Chamath responds. Chamath's like, 100%, you know, poker has been great for business. It helped me with everything. It helped me with my return on investment. I was like, that's right, Heaton.

That's right, you take that.

So anyway, that's just a fun story.

So wait, to go back on it, on the poker thing, it's not even just great for strategy or whatnot. If you ever want to get into poker, I'm not big on poker, it is amazing networking. Just from that aspect, the people you meet at home games, you'll find that you can end up doing business with a lot of people if you are playing in the right games. So I just want to put that out there for anyone who's Thinking about gambling or—

I can speak on that, Neil, because I actually do go to these home games. So one of the home games has like a— there's a few entrepreneurs there. Actually, everyone's an entrepreneur there. There's some bestselling authors there as well. You would know the names. And so we play like once a month or so. And then we were even talking about going to the World Series of Poker in July to play. But it's good because we end up talking about business. We talk about AI, we talk about— and we just, we have a lot of fun and we I will say this too, Neil. It's good for networking. That's number one. You just got to make sure you're hanging out with the right crew. Don't hang out at those underground poker games in LA. You probably don't want to do that. But the other thing is you learn how to manage your bankroll. You learn how to manage your emotions a lot better too. And you learn when to bet hard and press your chips versus when not to. So Neil, I got to give Neil a lot of credit. Neil knows when to press hard. When he sees an advantage, he presses really hard. I'm not going to give examples here, but very hard, harder than you'd ever imagine, right? I'll just leave it at that. Even when it comes to SEO. So all that to say is poker is good for you for— you need all these things. You need to learn bankroll management. You need to know who's the fish at the table. You need to know when to press hard. You need to know what your odds are at every stage of the game. And then to your point, Neil, it's great for networking too. Yeah.

When you said you played with a bestselling author, is this bestselling author a Stanford graduate?

No.

Okay, so it's not the one I'm thinking, not the one that posts a lot of political stuff on, uh, X.

I don't even know who you're talking about.

You do.

Who?

They're literally—

You can write it in chat. You can write it in chat.

Oh yeah, let's see, where's the chat button?

You can write in chat. Okay, so while, while Neil sends me that—

I can't chat with you.

You can? Okay, whatever.

Oh yeah, now I can. All right, check this out. Yeah, it's not that person, but that's who I assumed when you said best friend.

Oh no, no, no, no, absolutely not. No. No, no, definitely no. So anyway, that's a good place to end it. We will see you all tomorrow. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. Bye!