Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it's worth it

"But with more AI use comes higher costs. A recent study from research firm Gartner found that by 2030, inference on highly sophisticated AI models will cost AI firms 90% less than 2025 costs. But the research also found cheaper tokens won’t translate to cheaper enterprise AI because agentic models require far more tokens per task than standard models, and because AI providers won’t fully pass through lower costs to consumers." DeepSeek did the opposite. They passed through the lower costs to customers. sub