This argument is funny because you could have said the same thing 4 years ago: Uber still picks you up just as it did years before that, so what did all those millions spent on developer salaries get them?

Uber’s business is relentlessly confusing for people who think it’s a simple app to send an alert to a nearby driver to pick you up.

Uber operates at a scale where there are no trivial problems because even small changes can impact hundred of thousands of customers. They can also justify spending time and money on new features that only 0.1% of customers might use because 0.1% of their customers is a very large number.

This is not just me saying it. The Uber president himself says it in the article.

> so what did all those millions spent on developer salaries get them?

There was no doubt about what these developer salaries got them. It was to keep Uber stable and running in thousands of jurisdictions with varying rules/regulations.

The idea of using AI was (I hope) not just to replace developers for this purpose but to also ship features/products beyond what was already being offered. It has however not panned out as these CEOs/execs thought it would.

> They can also justify spending time and money on new features that only 0.1% of customers might use because 0.1% of their customers is a very large number.

And what are those features exactly? Because even the President of Uber doesn't seem to know:

"“That link is not there yet, right? I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25 percent more useful consumer features,’” said Macdonald."

The budget allocated to AI for the year has been wiped out in 4 months.

Uber also has to maintain thousands of region specific rules and features to be able to operate globally, and they do it all in the same app instead of having specific regional versions (which would be a terrible user experience for frequent travelers). That alone is a ton of work the end user will never see but is core to their operation.