| ▲ | browningstreet 3 hours ago |
| Somehow Uber and WeWork survived the same kind of grand projections that they never met. |
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| ▲ | 121789 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| uber sure....but how did wework survive? they are a smoldering husk of a failed company looted by its founder |
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| ▲ | hamdingers 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm sitting in one right now and don't see any smoldering... | | |
| ▲ | khuey an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | They literally went bankrupt and wiped out the original shareholders. | | |
| ▲ | hamdingers an hour ago | parent [-] | | I guess I'm just not clued into your exotic definition of "survived" if continuing to function doesn't qualify. I tend to go by the dictionary definition. Chapter 11 is not Chapter 7. Businesses survive chapter 11 bankruptcies all the time. For example, WeWork. |
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| ▲ | kevin2107 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | lmao. I'm sitting in Hiroshima and nothing is burning |
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| ▲ | naravara 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The company’s gone but the assets just got sold to other commercial real estate firms. Uber was basically only ever software to help people use their own cars so a very small part of their valuation was physical stuff to upkeep, it was just deals and obligations they had. Not sure how it shakes out for Anthropic and OpenAI. There’s a lot of physical capacity that needs to be built out and can depreciate. But there’s also a lot of network effects and dependencies being built in with enterprise users. I don’t know how swappable the tooling is either. I think over the long term the UI, model training and documentation, and infrastructure are going to end up being run by different parties and I’m not sure which leg of that chain ends up in a position to skim most of the profit off. My guess is that Apple and Google end up raking in all the money since they control the OS and app stores while the rest of the stack gets driven down to being generic commodities. At least where mass market consumer adoption is concerned. |
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| ▲ | tapoxi 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't think Uber was doing $1 trillion in infrastructure spend. |
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| ▲ | windexh8er 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The difference is that they had room to charge more of their customers and pay less to their workers. The AI industry doesn't have both sides to play at this point. Training and inference are getting more expensive and if you take on the high prices now you're just floating yourself further downstream from profitability long term (which does not look viable for any of them currently). |
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| ▲ | paxys 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| WeWork absolutely did not survive |
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| ▲ | hansmayer 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Funny you should mention Uber. What was it their COO said recently about the AI costs? |
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| ▲ | simonw 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I quoted exactly what they said in my piece, under the heading "The AI-failure stories around this are pretty thin": https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/#th... > But then you sometimes go and talk to your senior engineering leaders and you’re saying, OK, how many projects that were on the cutting room floor got moved above the line because of the productivity gains because 25% of our code commits were via Claude Code last quarter? > That link is not there yet, right? I think maybe implicitly there’s more that is getting shipped. But it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, OK, now we’re actually producing like 25% more useful consumer features, right? And that line is hard to draw. That's pretty weak sauce. I don't think that justifies the headlines that came out of it, personally. | | |
| ▲ | hansmayer 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | ? What are you talking about mate? The man all but says "this shit does not work for us".
It iss layered in that careful, sanitised corporate shit-sandwich communication approach, where you take a nice piece of shit and layer it in between two slices of avocado so its sweeter to swallow for the "consumer" of your message. He also said in that article that what prompted the discussion was the public statement by the Uber CTO that he had already burnt through his organisations yearly AI-budget in April. Please stop this shilling mate, and trying to hide the overall perspective between this or that word. | | |
| ▲ | simonw 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Did you read my piece? I covered the Uber CTO thing too: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/#th... > The most discussed has been Uber, based on this report where CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga indicated that Uber had “maxed out its full year AI budget just a few months into 2026”, mostly thanks to Claude Code. > Given that Claude Code only got really good in November it’s entirely unsurprising to me that a budget set in 2025 may have failed to predict demand for that tool in 2026! |
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| ▲ | PunchyHamster an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| uber doesn't own trillion in cars |
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| ▲ | xoac 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| somehow the invisible hand of the market is also blind af |
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| ▲ | ArcHound 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Makes sense if you think about it: if all photons pass through you (invisible) then you can't capture them to get info (blind). |
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| ▲ | seniorThrowaway 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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