CDN and cybersecurity giant Cloudflare held its Q2 earnings call on Thursday, during which chief financial officer Thomas Seifert gave a concerning prediction about what the web...
Well yeah. Of course it would, given the examples they are talking about.
It makes sense right? You have a computer, you can program it to do things. I have programmed mine to scrape data or examine websites, and even in some cases to pull entire directories down.
Now we have an agent do that. In other words a programmed computer tool that is acting on someones behalf using natural language as the question. Note the example given is an AI is looking across as many websites as it can for a review. Or maybe instructions to put something together. Or maybe a list of the highest peaks in the world with the least snowfall. Who knows, but that is endless.
So this “traffic” is still human driven. Its just using a computer to do the work. I think that changes the perspective a little bit. It is all human intention driven.
Also, all traffic by http plus every other request is still human, so that is a bit misleading.
Interestingly, its not like we havent been here before if you look at traffic. The syncing of usenet for a period of time was the largest user of all traffic. So all computer connections, much, much less humans.
Most traffic today is video, then gaming, than music, financial, screen sharing, p2p, and AI makes up a tiny portion. It just is making a huge number of requests for HTTP, but it is growing, and fast.
This is neither pro AI, nor anti AI. I am just trying to examine the landscape instead of the over simplistic headline that really is about Cloudflares business model.
You could say anything is human driven if you follow the thread far enough. I’d say if an automated process is cranking out hundreds of requests per minute then even though someone turned it on it still falls under a bot process. There is no human actually monitoring each request or interacting with it.
That’s not the point. Let’s put aside that an LLM driven agent is not deterministic ie, not always doing what the user intended, just like regular text autocomplete messes up as well regularly. The point is that like with e-mails when spam became so easy to generate that it flooded the system, now more sophisticated actions on the internet get easier to do (that said, most of it was possible already before, just required more skill), at least as long as LLMs are not charged at real costs but highly subsidised.
At some point something has to give. Either tools will be developed to somewhat reliably classify the nature of the traffic or things will start to be priced out as everyone will have to pay the bill for this new kind of spam (ie low value high volume traffic, or ill intended traffic)
Well yeah. Of course it would, given the examples they are talking about.
It makes sense right? You have a computer, you can program it to do things. I have programmed mine to scrape data or examine websites, and even in some cases to pull entire directories down.
Now we have an agent do that. In other words a programmed computer tool that is acting on someones behalf using natural language as the question. Note the example given is an AI is looking across as many websites as it can for a review. Or maybe instructions to put something together. Or maybe a list of the highest peaks in the world with the least snowfall. Who knows, but that is endless.
So this “traffic” is still human driven. Its just using a computer to do the work. I think that changes the perspective a little bit. It is all human intention driven.
Also, all traffic by http plus every other request is still human, so that is a bit misleading.
Interestingly, its not like we havent been here before if you look at traffic. The syncing of usenet for a period of time was the largest user of all traffic. So all computer connections, much, much less humans.
Most traffic today is video, then gaming, than music, financial, screen sharing, p2p, and AI makes up a tiny portion. It just is making a huge number of requests for HTTP, but it is growing, and fast.
This is neither pro AI, nor anti AI. I am just trying to examine the landscape instead of the over simplistic headline that really is about Cloudflares business model.
You could say anything is human driven if you follow the thread far enough. I’d say if an automated process is cranking out hundreds of requests per minute then even though someone turned it on it still falls under a bot process. There is no human actually monitoring each request or interacting with it.
That’s not the point. Let’s put aside that an LLM driven agent is not deterministic ie, not always doing what the user intended, just like regular text autocomplete messes up as well regularly. The point is that like with e-mails when spam became so easy to generate that it flooded the system, now more sophisticated actions on the internet get easier to do (that said, most of it was possible already before, just required more skill), at least as long as LLMs are not charged at real costs but highly subsidised.
At some point something has to give. Either tools will be developed to somewhat reliably classify the nature of the traffic or things will start to be priced out as everyone will have to pay the bill for this new kind of spam (ie low value high volume traffic, or ill intended traffic)