[sd9]

I see things like 2 sentence menu summaries in Uber Eats that are completely off in tone.

A quick sample from my app right now:

“Authentic Caribbean Flavours. Jerk Chicken, Curry Goat, and more. A vibrant culinary journey awaits.” - local Caribbean place

“Customisable burgers with 250,000+ toppings. Hand-cut fries and rich milkshakes await.” - Five Guys

“Authentic Indian cuisine bursting with rich flavours. Perfect for late-night cravings” - local Indian

Everything is Authentic, or Rich, or whatever.

—-

They’re investing in the wrong bits of AI. I’m sure they’re AB testing these soulless often inaccurate blurbs but I just cannot see how investing money into them actually sells more product.

On the other hand, if they had a coherent product vision, and trusted their engineers to use AI how they see fit, then I’m sure they would be more successful, and it would be cheaper.

[kelnos]

Aside from the hilarious "250,000+ toppings" error, these summaries seem... fine? I would be unsurprised to learn that a human came up with them, even. Seems like pretty common/standard marketing copy.

[sd9]

Maybe each one is fine in isolation - what doesn’t come across from the sample is that every single one is practically the same. If you have Uber Eats, open up the app and look through the summaries for a bunch of restaurants and you’ll see what I mean.

And besides that, this just feels like something nobody asked for that probably doesn’t sell more food compared to, for example, more pictures.

[yorwba]

Don't worry, they'll also use AI to add more pictures, which will all look strangely similar while bearing at best passing resemblance to anything you might actually receive after placing an order.

[recursivecaveat]

It seems to have been at least slightly improved, but youtube video summaries suffered from this to an almost comical degree not long ago. The AI voice is already pretty recognizable and stilted, then you constrain it to avoid saying anything negative or spoilery about the video, and (presumably) don't let it remember past output. No surprise its extremely repetitive. For humans you're at least getting different people's voices, on different days, who remember that they just wrote about how the last one was a "unique look highlighting the importance of design".

[nradov]

Most restaurant food is all the same though because they buy everything from Sysco.

[malfist]

That's like saying most home cooking in the country is the same because everything comes from Walmart/Kroger/Meijer.

[nradov]

No, you're missing the point. A lot of casual restaurants aren't even really cooking any more. They just heat up prepared food purchased from Sysco.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/restaurant-consoli...

[UncleMeat]

"A lot of" and "most" are different things.

Yes, a lot of places are not making their own jalepeno poppers. There's still plenty of stuff being made from raw ingredients all over the place.

[CJefferson]

So, I've just read a few dozen student reports, which I'm 95% sure were mostly generated by AI.

The problem isn't one page of one report. It's not even one whole report. But, the more you read, the more irritating it gets. It's hard not to notice the AIisms, and once you know them, it gets really obvious. And I know some people will say 'Oh, I say X', for any particular X, but the thing that people don't do is use some same construction at least twice a page, every page, forever.

Now, I can imagine there ends up being a bit of a battle, where AIs try to learn to write 'less AI', but for now, it's very obvious if you read enough AI generated stuff.

[gruez]

>It's hard not to notice the AIisms, and once you know them, it gets really obvious.

Maybe I haven't read enough uber eats descriptions to notice, but at least from the sampling above it doesn't seem too obviously AI. There might be a lot of cliche wording, but it's not even clear whether it's worse than human reviews/descriptions.

[mcmcmc]

I think that's exactly the point. It's the distillation of the most common marketing copy possible, and when that tone is applied everywhere it becomes very same-y, like those cookie cutter neighborhoods where every house is the exact same. Which to some extent defeats the purpose of marketing as it doesn't stand out at all, just sanitized sameness. It's boring and a bit creepy.

[onraglanroad]

That's not an error, it's what 5 Guys advertise. It's the number of combinations for their toppings.

[autoexec]

That sounds like an error to me. "Number of toppings" is not the same as "Number of possible combinations of toppings".

[idontwantthis]

Shouldn’t it be a lot more? Around 20 toppings in any combination and count would be 20! + 19! + 18! … no?

[drivebyhooting]

2^20

Does order of toppings matter?

[jcgrillo]

yes, only a monster would put the pickles underneath the tomato

[temp8830]

But why does Uber need to spend 3.4B on injecting a useless blob of text between me and an overpriced burger delivered by a struggling illegal immigrant in a smoke-belching jalopy?

I know the counter-argument. "This will increase sales". You know what else would increase sales? Spending the 3.4B to replace the above with a uniformed delivery service similar to UPS. That job could pay benefits.

[zdragnar]

My last job did something similar. An AI blurb feature was researched and built and costs a good chunk of resources to run for no reason other than being able to tell investors AI was being used.

I proposed a solution using simple heuristics that would have accomplished the same output, would have been cheaper to build and cost next to nothing to run, but being economical, efficient and boring doesn't make exciting PowerPoint slides.

[raincole]

> But why does Uber need to spend 3.4B on injecting a useless blob of text

They didn't. 3.4B was their total R&B cost. Don't blame AI for your human hallucination.

[grokcodec]

My R&B cost used to amount to buying the occasional Al Green album, how times have changed

[temp8830]

Why does a fast food delivery service need a research arm in the first place? It's not exactly rocket surgery.

[nradov]

In most large tech companies the senior leaders want to run some vanity projects so having a research arm makes that possible. They can screw around without impacting product teams.

[malfist]

R&D is literally what built uber and uber eats. Research to determine the product and _development_ to build it.

[rchaud]

For the same reason the shoe industry spends billions sponsoring athletes and sports teams to hawk their gear. It's to build layer upon layer of abstractions to move the conversation away from how the sausage is made, and towards something that could justify their own bloated salaries, like promoting "sporting excellence" or "tech innovation".

[pllbnk]

This looks like a false advertising and in this case they can't blame it on the "human error".

[array_key_first]

Right, it seems just like a marketing blip, which is bad, because marketing isn't meant to be informative, it's meant to be manipulative.

If we're using AI and we're still getting the gobbley gook nothing burger marketing word soup, then what are we doing here?

No, not everything IS rich and authentic. And no, it's not awaiting me!

[ajkjk]

they make me feel embarrassed to be human

[mvdtnz]

The linked article is not about usage of AI in the product. It's about blowing the budget on AI coding tools, which is a much more interesting topic to discuss given how heavily they are being pushed by some companies.

If AI coding tools were having the benefits promised by AI vendors then Uber would be dropping staff, not the tools themselves.

[jatins]

Yeah, what's going on in these cos is that a PM is tasked to find ways of integrating AI into product and well if someone's payroll depends on it they _will_ find ways to integrate AI into product. "Hey I couldn't find ways to integrate AI into product" is not an acceptable response.

And it's not just Uber. My weather app has an AI weather summary these days

[parpfish]

Product reviews from real people are useful because they are allowed to say negative things.

Once you bypass the real reviews for a summary, all those useful negative signals get glossed over because the host platform doesn’t want to piss off the restaurants by propagating those negative comments.

[mikeocool]

The article seems to suggest the unexpected spend was primarily on coding tools, like Claude Code.

One would hope Uber could manage 1 sentence API summaries (regardless of their quality) for less than $3.4 billion.

[jcgrillo]

> if they had a coherent product vision, and trusted their engineers to use AI how they see fit, then I’m sure they would be more successful

Out of curiosity, what do you think might be a successful application for AI in Uber's business? It seems like this is the sort of thing AI applications end up being. Does it actually get better than this?

[skippyboxedhero]

You're absolutely right.

[daliusd]

I am disappointed that not all your comments are this line :D

[hedgehog]

That's a very insightful observation, highlighting the genuine tension between consistent messaging and quick, pithy responses on Hacker News.

[skippyboxedhero]

i have a solid picture now, the honest answer is: you're absolutely right

[wat10000]

I don't want my fries and milkshakes to await. I want them to be made fresh when I order them. Silly robots.

[darth_avocado]

> They’re investing in the wrong bits of AI

They’re investing on the wrong bits, not wrong bits of AI. No matter how many features they come up with after spending billions of dollars, customers are not any more likely to order food than they already are. The money is better spent reducing their atrocious fees and making sure the restaurant isn’t marking up every single menu item by 25%.

[nradov]

I don't necessarily disagree, but it seems like there are plenty of customers willing to pay ridiculous prices for delivering mediocre food.

[ares623]

You misunderstand. AI cannot fail. It can only _be_ failed. In this case, it was failed by the restaurant industry's lack of actual diversity. _They_ need to do better, not AI.

[mandeepj]

I've never cared about those menu summaries! I always look at menu items and their descriptions. They are fine, at least to me.

[mcmcmc]

More than half the menu item descriptions I see now are AI generated, and some are completely inaccurate.

[dawnerd]

I stopped ordering after I realized most places were using ai photos and descriptions. It’s worse than the stock images they’d use in the old days. It’s actively lying about what an item is.

[gib444]

The only accurate summary is "shit and overpriced"