Consider rewiring your perspective: getting an edge doesn't really matter; the only thing that matters is will customers pay for this? Is this a useful, valuable problem to solve?

Coding faster doesn't really solve that.

Uber makes more money if people buy more rides, order more food, have some breakthrough in autonomous driving. They can save money if they can optimize some ops or spend somewhere. Is there any evidence that with the spend on AI that they achieved any of this? If they did, I'm sure we'd hear about it in some engineering blog.