🤖 Uber Burned Its Entire AI Budget in 4 Months — And Can't Show Results

AI is cracking under the weight of its own hype — and today's episode exposes the fault lines. Uber's COO just admitted the company blew through its full annual AI budget in just four months, with no clear proof it improved anything for users. Meanwhile, the entry-level job market is quietly vanishing — not showing up in headline unemployment numbers, but devastating for new graduates who are now booing AI evangelists at their own commencement ceremonies. Pope Leo XIV dropped a sweeping 42,000-word document this week using AI as a lens to examine concentrated power, eroding democracy, and what he calls digital slavery. On the security front, hackers have moved far beyond simple jailbreaks — they're now exploiting the very intelligence and personality built into modern AI systems. And the race to build AI infrastructure is running headfirst into ethics scandals, outdated energy policy, and nationalist procurement battles. Nobody has this figured out — not Google, not governments, not the Vatican. But everyone is being forced to reckon with it right now.

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Welcome to Daily Inference, your daily dose of the most important stories shaping the world of artificial intelligence. I'm your host, and today we're diving into a fascinating mix of stories that reveal just how complicated the AI moment really is — from papal proclamations to corporate spending crises, and a generation of graduates who are not having it. Let's get into it.

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Alright, let's kick things off with a story that should make every tech executive pause. Uber, one of the most tech-forward companies on the planet, is openly questioning whether its AI spending is actually worth it. According to Uber's president and COO Andrew Macdonald, the company reportedly burned through its entire annual AI budget in just four months this year. Four months. And here's the kicker — Macdonald says he can't draw a clear line between the skyrocketing costs of running tools like Claude Code and any meaningful improvement in features being delivered to actual users. He described it as a link that simply isn't there yet. Now, this is significant. Uber isn't a scrappy startup feeling its way in the dark. This is a massive, data-driven operation. And if they're struggling to quantify AI ROI, you can bet boardrooms across industries are having the exact same uncomfortable conversation. The era of writing blank checks for AI tools because it feels like the future may be hitting a wall of accountability.

Connected to that theme is what's happening at the workforce level. MIT Technology Review is pushing back on what it calls the AI jobs hysteria, noting that despite high-profile layoffs at companies like Coinbase, Meta, and Cisco, aggregate employment in developed economies remains broadly stable. So mass unemployment hasn't materialized — yet. But here's the more nuanced and arguably more troubling finding: the entry-level job market is quietly eroding. The first rung of the career ladder — those junior roles where people traditionally learn the ropes — is disappearing. AI is handling tasks that used to be handed to recent grads as training grounds. And that's a crisis hiding beneath relatively calm headline numbers.

This connects directly to a scene playing out at graduation ceremonies across the United States. Students at multiple universities have been booing commencement speakers who enthusiastically promote AI. At Middle Tennessee State University, music executive Scott Borchetta told graduates that AI is rewriting his entire industry and told them to, quote, deal with it. The crowd responded with boos. These aren't Luddites rejecting technology. These are people who just spent four years and potentially significant debt investing in their futures, only to be told the rules changed while they were studying. The disconnect between AI evangelists and people on the ground who see their career paths narrowing is becoming impossible to ignore.

Now, into that vacuum of moral authority steps an unlikely voice — the Pope. Pope Leo XIV released his first major papal document this week, titled Magnifica Humanitas, which translates to Magnificent Humanity. It's a sweeping 42,000-word encyclical that takes direct aim at AI's unchecked expansion. The Pope draws a deliberate parallel to his predecessor Leo XIII, who addressed the social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution in 1891. The message now is strikingly similar: technology is outpacing ethical regulation, human dignity is being threatened, and political leaders need to act. He specifically calls out AI-powered warfare, the effects of automation on labor, and what he describes as new forms of digital slavery created by the tech economy. Interestingly, TechCrunch makes the point that the encyclical isn't really about AI at all — it's using AI as a lens to examine deeper problems: concentrated power, eroding democracy, and a tech elite reshaping the world in its own image. Whether you're religious or not, it's hard to argue with that framing.

And while the Pope calls for ethical guardrails, the AI security landscape is escalating in ways that make those calls more urgent. Wired reports that we're in the middle of an arms race around software vulnerability hunting. AI tools are enabling attackers to find and exploit security flaws faster than ever before. Meanwhile, The Verge highlights how hackers have moved well beyond the simple jailbreaks of early chatbot days — where you could just politely ask an AI to ignore its safety training. Now they're exploiting the nuanced personalities and contextual reasoning built into modern AI systems. As AI gets smarter, the attack surface gets more complex. And as TechCrunch put it — everyone, including Google, is navigating AI security in real time. Nobody has this figured out.

One final thread worth pulling on: the geopolitics of AI infrastructure. The UK's Chancellor Rachel Reeves is pushing cabinet ministers to buy British when it comes to AI procurement, part of a broader push to keep AI investment and its economic benefits onshore. Meanwhile, in Scotland, a policy designed to attract green data centers was written before ChatGPT even existed, meaning it completely fails to account for the enormous energy demands of modern AI workloads. And in Louisiana, a state senator who helped secure permits for Meta's massive Hyperion data center — one of the world's largest — then sold land adjacent to the site, raising serious ethics questions. The race to build AI infrastructure is colliding hard with governance, ethics, and environmental accountability all at once.

So what's the throughline here? AI is simultaneously too expensive to justify for some, too disruptive to ignore for workers, too powerful to leave unregulated according to the Vatican, and too insecure to trust blindly. We are, as one headline put it, genuinely in a transition period — and everyone is navigating it in real time.

Before we wrap up, don't forget to visit dailyinference.com to subscribe to our daily AI newsletter. We break down the most important developments every single day so you stay ahead of the curve. And again, huge thanks to our sponsor 60sec.site — build your AI-powered website in sixty seconds flat.

That's your Daily Inference for today. Stay curious, stay critical, and we'll see you tomorrow.