Speaking at a conference in San Francisco, Uber Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi rattled through the company's ambitions: food delivery, freight, autonomous vehicles and even buses and bikes.

Ultimately, Uber Technologies Inc.'s business is getting people from "point A to point B," he said at a Goldman Sachs-hosted event on Wednesday. The drive to realize such goals means the company will continue to lose money, he acknowledged, a day after Uber reported a loss of $4.5 billion for 2017 on $7.5 billion in net revenue.

To drive home his point, Khosrowshahi compared Uber to Amazon on more than one occasion. While Amazon had almost $178 billion in sales in 2017, net income was $2.24 billion. "Cars are to us what books are to Amazon," he said. Khosrowshahi said that by 2023, he could imagine Uber providing the entire transportation network for a city.