Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince: AI Cos May Compensate Sources Soon | EXCLUSIVE

Yeah. So 80% of the leading AI companies use Cloudflare's network in order to be fast, secure, reliable, and increasingly in order to actually power inference all around the world. So if you want to make sure that when someone is asking your AI a question that it's fast and responsive in Delhi, in Rio, in Tokyo, in New York City, Cloudflare is the network that can allow you to do that. And so I'm incredibly proud of the fact that so many AI companies are relying on us to build the future of AI and so much of the internet is relying on us. And being in the middle of that is just incredibly exciting.

You know, I think no matter what, the internet's business model is about to change radically. And in order to understand it, you have to understand what the business model has been for most of the history of the internet. The business model was create original content, drive traffic and then sell either things, subscriptions or ads. And the great benefactor of the internet has been Google. And Google had a search engine. And you would type something into the search engine like, you know, I want to figure out what the best restaurant tonight in Delhi is to get chicken tikka masala or something like that. And it would return back a list of 10 blue links. And the search wasn't over at that point. That was a treasure map. And then you as a user had to search through that to figure out what the answer was. And different sites would emerge to actually say, listen, we have the best list of restaurants in Delhi. So click on this and we'll give you reviews and information. We'll sell ads along with that. Maybe help you make reservations. And that was the business model of the internet. What's happened though is that increasingly with these new AI systems, they're not search engines, they're answer engines. You ask them a question and rather than giving you 10 blue links you have to go search through, it says, 'Hey, the best restaurant in Delhi is X' and gives you the answer right there. That's amazing as a user, but it's putting some real strain on content creators and ads. You know, if the answer engines don't click on ads, they don't buy subscriptions, and the answer is right there without you having to go anywhere. And so, what is the business model going to be if traffic isn't the currency of the future internet?

Well, I think no matter what, we've got to find some way for hardworking journalists like yourself to still be able to eat. You should get paid for the hard work that you're doing. And so if directly from the companies are going to be pulling all of that data from original content creators, journalists, researchers, academics, then there has to be some sort of value exchange.

In the past, that value exchange with Google was they would take your content and they would send you back traffic. I think going forward you're going to see increasingly that AI companies are going to take your content and they're going to send you back actually compensation for helping give them the information that trains the models. And that's what we're working through and that's what we're talking to both the AI companies and the content creators about what does that future business model look like.