The internet is breaking. So what’s next?

MATTHEW PRINCE: Google is the hero of the last 30 years of the internet. They financed the entire thing. The problem is that AI breaks that. 18 months ago, it was 20 times harder to get traffic from Google than it was 10 years ago. Now it’s 50 times harder. It’s 3,500 times harder to get traffic from OpenAI than the Google of old. 65,000 times harder to get traffic from Anthropic. Why did Sam and Elon start OpenAI? Because they were terrified that Google was going to run away with the whole game. Everything started effectively as a counterweight to Google, and that’s the puzzle.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Cloudflare CEO, Matthew Prince, speaking to me live on stage at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas in mid-March. Cloudflare helps facilitate more than 20% of all online traffic, which gives Matthew a unique perspective about how AI is changing the internet and the motivations of the major tech platforms. He also shares his real-time experience on the front lines of cyber war with Iran. This is Matthew’s second appearance on the show, and he doesn’t disappoint. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

So please join me in welcoming Matthew Prince, CEO and a co-founder of Cloudflare. Yes.

PRINCE: These look very official.

Copy LinkWhy AI is accelerating internet change faster than expected

SAFIAN: Very official. This is a very official gathering. We’re very official, folks. You were on my show six months ago. And since that time, so much has changed. You talked about how the number of new websites has grown dramatically.

PRINCE: After plateauing for a really long time, actually declining for a little bit, we’re now seeing the fastest creation of new websites that has happened in the entire history of the web.

SAFIAN: The amount of bot traffic has gone from about 20% of all traffic to trending to 50% by 2027 and growing.

PRINCE: Now we think it’ll be over half of internet traffic is generated by bots.

SAFIAN: And the business model of the future is unclear. You gave this example about how even Walmart, Amazon, and Target have wildly different business models, right? Wildly different approaches.

PRINCE: Walmart has said, “Agents are welcome, come one, come all.” Amazon is literally suing companies, and it was just successful in a motion against Perplexity saying you are not an agent allowed to shop on amazon.com – two of the smartest retailers in the world have wildly divergent strategies. It’s so rare that that happens, and I think it just shows how uncertain everyone is about what the future’s going to look like.

Copy LinkWhat cyber conflict with Iran reveals about modern digital warfare

SAFIAN: To add to all of this, we now have a conflict in the Middle East.

PRINCE: Really?

SAFIAN: Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you about this because I remember when you talked to me, you said, and I’m going to quote this, “Cloudflare goes to war every day with Iranian hackers, Russian hackers, and North Koreans.” Now, what is the status of that now with the conflict going on?

PRINCE: Yeah, so it was interesting, sometimes we see things and we can’t explain them. But on February 27th, the attacks coming out of Iran, so from Iran targeting the West, increased 7X off baseline. So there’s always sort of background, and then on February 27th, a massive spike. Why? We’re not sure. Did they get advanced warning that on the 28th, the U.S. was going to start bombing? Was it just coincidence? What was going on? We’re not sure, but we did see that massive spike. Usually in kinetic conflict, so what we saw Russia, Ukraine, we saw Israel, Hamas, cyber proceeds and then stays elevated through the entire time of when there’s a physical war going on. And then often lasts slightly after whenever peace is declared. In this case, it was different. So we saw a massive spike on the 27th, and on the 28th, it dropped down to less than 10% of baseline, so –

SAFIAN: Less than 10% of what it had been before.

PRINCE: What it had been before. We think that what had happened was that the U.S. and Israeli strikes were so effective at disrupting command and control inside of Iran, that even the hackers were sort of like, “We’re not sure what to do.” Now that’s coming back. We’ve seen a dramatic uptick in Iranian attacks. Stryker, a big, big Michigan-based corporation got completely compromised, it looks like by Iranians. I think you’re going to see a lot more of that because it is one of the things when you have these asymmetric conflicts where you have a very powerful nation taking on a much weaker nation. Cyber is one of the ways that they can strike back. I also think that we’ll see a lot of other nation states that don’t necessarily want to get blamed for cyber attacks. Russia is the largest offender of this.

Russia is extremely vulnerable to cyber attacks themselves. And so I would’ve predicted that after the Russia-Ukraine conflict starts in February of 2022, that we would’ve seen a massive uptick in the number of Russian cyber attacks that happened. That has not largely happened nearly as much. There have been some, but it’s not the wave that we thought, but part of the reason we think, and again, speculation, but part of the reason we think is because Russia itself is so vulnerable to attack that if they directly attack the U.S.–

SAFIAN: They would be attacked back.

PRINCE: We would come back at them and would shut down their entire power industrial base, a lot of different things. And so there’s sort of a mutually assured destruction concept to cyber. Russian attacks really ticked up when Israel and Hamas took off, and Russia was doing a lot to try and disguise their cyber attacks as if they were coming from Hamas or Iran. And so I would imagine that we’re going to see a lot more Russian attacks that will be trying again to look like Iran.

SAFIAN: And the efforts to sort of degrade Iran’s capabilities, that doesn’t necessarily extend to cyber in the same way it does to other things. Or we don’t know.

PRINCE: One of the internal debates at Cloudflare right now is the Iranian internet is shut off. And the question is, did they do that to themselves? Because that’s what they have historically done. They want to block it. It’s a way to quell protests.  Or did the U.S. do that to them, or Israel? Because typically in a, again, kinetic conflict, the first thing that you do is you try to disable the communication systems of whoever you’re about to bomb. And so that would be very normal. But on the other hand, the state department went through extensive efforts to try and get things like Starlink and other things into Iran, it’s not clear entirely whether Iran shut down the internet themselves or if the U.S. and Israel shut it down.

The evidence that they did it to themselves is that there is still from some cellular networks and specifically from some SIM cards, we see access and what that traffic is accessing is things that you would imagine elites inside of Iran trying to access. So a lot of cryptocurrency exchanges, because if you’re trying to get assets out, that’s one of the ways that you would do it. A lot of social media and news trying to see what is going on in the world, that leans in the favor of they did it to themselves, and they’ve basically whitelisted a certain set of elites.  What leans against it is the U.S. is really good and the Israelis are very good at cyber.

Copy LinkWhy AI is helping hackers move faster and defenders think bigger

SAFIAN: One of the discussions about AI is for hackers, you want your AI to be better than their AI because they’re using one and you’re – is that a factor in this engagement or not as much yet?

PRINCE: No, AI is making everyone more efficient, and that includes hackers. So that the time from when a hacker gains access to a system to how much damage they can do has compressed massively. So that if in the past it might have taken days from, you get access to one system, how do you get access to the whole company? Now it’s taking hours or minutes in order to do that. There was a tool made by a company called Salesloft called Drift. It got compromised by some Russian hackers, and it gave the Russian hackers access to the vast majority of Salesforce clients. It was not nearly as harmful as possible because the hacker didn’t understand Salesforce. And so they were spending several days just trying – I mean, not a lot of people understand Salesforce. But they –

SAFIAN: Sometimes even the people at Salesforce.

PRINCE: Even the people. How do we have so many Salesforce administrators? It doesn’t make any sense. But this was an attack that happened six months ago. I think what you would see today is that AI would allow them to get much smarter–

SAFIAN: To get up to speed that much faster.

PRINCE: That much faster and do that much more harm. That’s the bad news. The good news is at the end of the day, who wins in the AI race is whoever has the most data. We can talk about chips, we can talk about researchers, those things will become commodities more and more over time. The thing that will differentiate is whoever has the most data, and the good guys have more data than the bad guys. At some level, we would’ve never described ourselves this way, but at some level, Cloudflare has always been an AI company where we take – I mean, the reason we have a free service is because all of that is information that we can feed into machine learning algorithms to look for what the new security threats are. In the same way that we all, three and a half years ago, ChatGPT comes out and we’re like, “Whoa, that’s amazing.”

Internally, we’d had those machine learning systems that were in finding things that we already knew about and identifying them more quickly. But about three and a half years ago was the first time where our system started to identify threats that no human had identified before. And so I think that there’s going to be a bunch of horror stories around AI. There’s going to be families that send their life savings to some gang members.

SAFIAN: Yeah. I mean, AI phishing data is bad. Yeah.

PRINCE: But I think the macro trend is that actually the internet is going to get – and cyber is going to get a lot better because of AI, even though you’re going to have a whole bunch of headlines that are going to sound very scary.

Copy LinkWho will get left behind because of AI?

SAFIAN: Since the last time we talked, you’ve become much more vocal about AI layoffs. I will say that I’ve had other conversations with folks who are sort of like, “Some of the layoffs you see, it’s really just businesses using AI as an excuse.” You see this as more transformational.

PRINCE: Everybody should just be super honest with themselves about which camp they’re in. And there are two camps. Right now there is a camp, it’s like if we were – on this floor, there are a bunch of screws, if we were in the business of screwing screws into floors, up until about six months ago, we were doing it by hand, and we were really good at it. And we hired some of the best hand screwdrivers in the world. And then again, there was talk for the last three years that, “Oh, this new technology is coming, and we’re going to have automatic electric screwdrivers, and everyone’s going to be so much more productive.” And they’re like, “Yeah, we tried it. It doesn’t work that well.”

But somewhere around November and anyone who’s paying attention felt it, the screwdrivers got really good and the electric screwdrivers became incredibly effective. And we now have people in one camp that are literally a hundred times more productive than they were before. They put down entire floors in a day when it used to take a month. That’s one camp.

We have another camp who’s like, “Yes, yes, but I prefer my manual screwdriver.”

SAFIAN: I’m so used to it. It’s always worked well for me.

PRINCE: And you told me that if I came here and I used my manual screwdriver, that I would have a job forever.” And I believed it when I said that. But I can’t have a world where one employee is a hundred times as productive as the other. People are like, “Are you losing sleep over Iran?” I’m like, “I probably should be, but I’m not.” “Are you losing sleep over other things?” What I’m losing sleep over right now is that we have a bunch of our team that’s using electric screwdrivers, we still have a bunch of our team that thinks that their job is to use manual screwdrivers and they’re complaining that, “Oh, the electric screwdrivers make mistakes or they do various things,” but they’re missing the point.

And my job has to be: how do I get those folks that are really good with manual screwdrivers to come along? And what’s scary for them because it tends to be, it’s not the super senior people, it’s not the super junior people, it’s the people in the middle who said, “You told me this is the game. I’ve been playing this game really, really well. I’ve been doing that. How dare you change the rules on me? And if you do change the rules and I adopt them, how do I have any advantage over the intern?”

SAFIAN: Right, “Am I going to be good with the electric screwdriver? I don’t know.”

PRINCE: I don’t know. And everything that I was good at was, I was really good with the manual screwdriver. And that’s a super scary thing for people who are sort of in the middle of their career. And what I am deeply worried about, and this isn’t a Cloudflare thing, this is an industry-wide thing. It’s not even a tech thing.

SAFIAN: Yeah, I was going to ask you, is this just – I mean, I know it applies to software and coding, but if you’re in another business?

PRINCE: Legal. It’s a funny thing because everyone expects machines to be perfect. These are not perfect machines. These are fallible machines, but it’s effectively like you have a hundred times the number of employees and they make mistakes, but it’s great, they can check each other and they take a whole bunch of work that was pretty dredgerous, writing comments on code, in finance, copying information from one spreadsheet to another, and legal, summarizing a bunch of documents. I mean, those are all things that humans did, we don’t need that anymore. That doesn’t mean we need fewer humans. Cloudflare will have more employees, we will continue to grow the number of employees at about the same rate that we have. But what I’m deeply worried about is how do I get the folks who are just worshiping their manual screwdriver to realize that the world –

SAFIAN: And if I’m someone who – I’m using an electric screwdriver sometimes, but not for everything in my job.

PRINCE: It’s totally fine. And there’s a time and a place. Be honest. If you think that your job is to convince people that electric screwdrivers are bad, you’re a dinosaur. And what I’m deeply afraid of is I think that there’s a generation of people who are between the ages of about 25 and 40, who there’s a real risk they’re going to get completely left behind. It’s also terrifying for society. Let’s imagine you’ve got – unemployment rate spikes for people in that age group. That’s the people who are going to start to become more politically active, the populism we’ve seen today could get even worse and even crazier. And again, I think a huge part of my job is: how do I convince people the ship has sailed? We are not debating whether electric screwdrivers are better than manual.

SAFIAN: And it’s not a question, you’re saying, I’m in favor of electric. It just, it is. It’s the reality.

PRINCE: It’s not just us. It’s every single company. And so what we saw out of Oracle, what we saw out of Atlassian, what we saw at Block, everyone is going to do it. And even the companies that are growing like crazy, and they might turn around and hire a whole bunch of new people. We’re hiring over 1,111 interns. It’s a number that means something to us. But why? We’re pairing each of the interns with a more senior member of our team, because usually the mentorship goes from senior to junior. We think it’s going to be completely different this year, where we think that our team needs to learn from the people who are sort of the natives at electric screwdrivers in order to understand it.

We had an outage last year that was really bad. It was basically because a configuration file went out that was malformed. So what’s the solution to that? Well, we now have an employee effectively that doesn’t need to sleep, doesn’t need to eat, doesn’t take breaks, and whose information biases are completely uncorrelated with the rest of our team. And they can check every single configuration change before it goes out, not to change it or even, but to flag it like this, “Hey, this might be a problem.”

SAFIAN: And this employee is—

PRINCE: AI, is an agent, right? And again, we’re not going to hire someone to do that. You couldn’t. And they would inherently have biases and all kinds of things. It’s the perfect use case for this. And everyone’s going to implement it. And by the way, the internet, the cloud, all these things are going to become massively more reliable because we can have something that just checks everything. And there was a 14-day debate internally about whether or not we should do this. What the? Of course we should do that.

SAFIAN: Matthew is not one to mince his words, which I love from the Iran cyber war to electric screwdrivers, he doesn’t hold back. So how much does he trust the big AI companies and how much control do the rest of us have in shaping our tech future? We’ll talk about that more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince talked about cyber war in Iran and how AI impacts have shifted in just the last few months. Now we talk about whether the big AI companies are motivated to operate in the larger public interest and how changes in the internet create both challenges and opportunities for industries from media to small business. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkShould AI companies pay for the content they’re leveraging?

When we talked last time, the news that we were talking about was a new tool that Cloudflare had out about helping to block AI bots from crawling content sites if they didn’t want it. In that conversation, you said you sort of believed that the AI companies were trying to do the right thing. Has that perspective moved at all? I mean, we’ve seen a lot of differentiation lately between Anthropic and OpenAI and how they’re dealing with the government. Do you feel like anything has moved in that?

PRINCE: I think I’m more convinced that that’s the case. 80% of the AI companies use us and so we know them really well. All the big ones use us, and they’re not stupid and they understand that they are part of an ecosystem and they have to behave inside that ecosystem and they’re going to act rationally. And so in the case of media, if you were just giving media away for free, of course they’re going to take it. It’s not the right answer for everyone. For Cloudflare, we don’t want to block AI crawlers from crawling our knowledge base. We want the AI systems to be able to know how to use Cloudflare. So we don’t block them, we welcome them. But if your business is selling ads or selling subscriptions, you might say, “Hey, unless you compensate me, you don’t get my stuff.” And that’s rational. And so we’re just providing the tools to do that.

What we have seen having now that is that the deals that people are getting, whether it’s DotDash Meredith or Conde Nast or other big media companies have gotten significantly better. 

Now, there’s still a lot that’s there. And the real challenge is, it’s sort of like a superhero movie where the hero of the last movie becomes the villain of the next. Google is the hero of the last 30 years of the internet. They financed the entire thing. They built a search engine and then they needed to create content in order to make the search engine valuable. So they built the monetization engine that powered the entire internet. And the business model of the internet was generate content, drive traffic, and then sell things, subscriptions or ads. That’s been the business model of the internet. The problem is that AI breaks that. It doesn’t work that way.

And so at some level, there has to be a value exchange. It could be monetary, but it could just be ego. A lot of times you create something, you put Google Analytics on it just because you’re just like, “Wow, look how many people are reading it.” But that’s gone way, way, way down because they’re not reading it directly. They’re reading the –

SAFIAN: They’re reading the summary. The AI summary.

PRINCE: –the CliffsNotes version of it and so even if you’re all–

SAFIAN: Which we’ve all become addicted to.

PRINCE: Yeah, and so it has gone – 18 months ago, it was 20 times harder to get traffic from Google than it was 10 years ago. Now in 18 months, now it’s 50 times harder. And that’s the good news. It’s 3,500 times harder to get traffic from OpenAI than from the Google of old. It’s 65,000 times harder to get traffic from Anthropic than Google.  That’s changing. And so the value exchange needs to change. Now, I think it’s going to get fixed, but who’s the problem today? The problem is Google because Google believes that they have a God-given right to be able to take all of your content and then they would send you back traffic, but they stop sending you back traffic.

Why did Sam and Elon start OpenAI? Because they were terrified that Google was going to run away with the whole game. And so everything started effectively as a counterweight to Google. And so when you go to OpenAI, when you go to Anthropic and you say, “You should pay for content,” they’re like, “We will as soon as Google does.” And that’s the puzzle. That’s the trick. If I’m Sundar and I’m running Google, the smartest thing they could do is actually go and make a market because they have the most money. They have a profitable business–

SAFIAN: But it’s a cost that has never been part of their business model, right?

PRINCE: Totally. But in the future, AI companies are going to look more like Netflix than some university research lab. The thing that’s going to differentiate them, and you all intuitively know this, we see how the underlying model is a commodity. So what differentiates commodity? At the end of the day, it’s going to be who has access to unique data.

So if I’m Sundar, my strategy is to go out and say, “I’m going to do semi-exclusive.” You can’t do exclusive because there’ll be antitrust problems, but semi-exclusive deals with all of the most important content in the world, and that will lock them into being the winner going forward. What they’re doing now is they just have unique access. How much more of the internet does Google see than Microsoft Bing? For every one page that Bing sees, Google sees five. And when you look at those four pages that Bing isn’t seeing, there’s some of the most valuable content, especially for AI. It’s things like health, data, academic data, a lot of specific local information. Those are the things that are the most valuable for AI. OpenAI knows how important this is, so they are the second best, but for every 3.5 pages Google sees, OpenAI only sees one. So Google has this massive advantage. And when people were saying, “How did Gemini catch up?” And we can debate whether it’s better or worse, whatever.

SAFIAN: But it’s back to your point about data. It’s about data and–

PRINCE: All about data. And I think what the problem is, if we either don’t find a way to bring Google down and say that in the new world, you have to compete on the same level as everyone else or bring everybody else up, which actually is kind of interesting because I actually think that the AI companies, what they would pay to support journalists is actually not anything close to what they would pay to catch Google. And so maybe the answer to this, maybe the first move is to say, “Hey, OpenAI, you want to see those three pages that Google sees every time you only see one, here’s what it costs. And by the way, we’re going to distribute that out to the content creators.”

SAFIAN: But you have to create a marketplace for that–

PRINCE: Yeah. But then if you game theory that out, what happens? Well, all of a sudden, when content providers are like, “Wait, so why are we giving this all for free to Google?” Then Google starts to get restricted and maybe we actually get to a place – I am super optimistic in the media space that we might be on the golden age of content creation. And that what will get rewarded in the future is actually much better. The business model of, generate content, drive traffic, sell ads, I would argue maybe has led to a lot of the problems the world has today because what generates traffic?

SAFIAN: It’s whatever sharpest, spicy.

PRINCE: Whoever generates the biggest cortisol response, generates the most traffic. AI doesn’t care about that because all AI cares about is the facts. They want all the facts. And so there’s amazing things that journalists have that are incredible resources that the AI companies would pay a fortune for. Imagine you don’t just get the article, but you get all the journalist notes that were behind it. Now, and there are things you have to do around protecting sources and that stuff, but you can imagine a world in which you do that, that all of a sudden is this treasure trove that really does start to advance towards a media future the AI companies want to pay for. They have a mathematical model of human knowledge.

They also then know what the gaps are in human knowledge. They want to fill the gaps. It turns out I want to read the stories about people filling the gaps. I don’t want to read yet another story about what crazy thing happened in Washington DC yesterday. I want to read the, “Wow, I didn’t know that,” that kind of amazing – that’s what we all light up for. And that’s the thing that’s going to get rewarded.

Copy LinkWhy local reporting could become more valuable in AI search

My wife and I bought a small local newspaper in our hometown, it’s in Park City, Utah. We bought it because it was dying, and we think local news is important. What we did not appreciate was it actually might be that local news is a thing that is the most valuable going forward. We might make more this year off licensing our stories to AI companies than we do off digital media, digital advertising. Why? Because Park City, Utah is a place some of you go on vacation, when you go on vacation, you might want to ask your AI, “What’s the hot new restaurant in Park City, Utah?” And if you don’t have the Park Record, then you don’t know the answer to that.

SAFIAN: So it’s more valuable information, but to a smaller group of people.

PRINCE: Maybe to a smaller group of people, but–

SAFIAN: But it doesn’t matter because it’s valuable.

PRINCE: It’s valuable. And so I think that it’s those things. I would love it if the New York Times started reviewing hotel rooms. Is it better to stay in Room 1427 or 1429 in the Marriott Marquis? And that would actually be super valuable information. Those sorts of little hyper local things are way more interesting than just telling the same story with a slightly different bent. The thing that’s just terribly unfair to the New York Times that I keep saying, if you don’t license the New York Times as an AI company, just license the Wall Street Journal and then have your AI rewrite it as if it’s a New York liberal and you got the New York Times, right? Unfair, but there’s some version of that.

And it’s the reason why Reddit, the public numbers, Reddit got seven times, for the same number of tokens, seven times the amount that the New York Times did. Why? Because if you don’t have Reddit, you don’t have Reddit. There’s no substitute. Whereas there’s lots of substitutes for that. I think the media of the future is how do I create information and knowledge that there isn’t a substitute for?

Copy LinkWhat brand trust means in a world run by shopping agents

SAFIAN: So I want to ask you a little bit about the value of brand. For you, how important is the brand of Cloudflare? I mean, you’ve been talking about the most important internet company that you never heard of, it’s like a backhanded compliment. But for you, how do you think about what the brand–

PRINCE: We schedule outages from time to time just so that people appreciate how much we — it’s funny, we have an outage, our stock goes up. It’s like, “That’s really weird.”

SAFIAN: But seriously though, how do you think about what the brand of Cloudflare should be and how important is that in the value that you have in the future?

PRINCE: So first of all, let’s talk about what brands are. Brands are just shortcuts for humans to understand value and quality, right? You buy Nike shoes and you have an expectation of what the value and quality is. If I say, “What’s it like to walk into a Walmart?” We all know exactly what that experience is like because we’ve all had it and the brand stands for that. What’s interesting is I’m not sure any of those things matter in a world of agentic commerce. What a brand is going to be radically different. And someone has to invent it because if we don’t invent what that is, then the agents are all going to be this massive force of consolidation, if you–

SAFIAN: Because all they’re going to do is go to whatever – they don’t care about the brand.

PRINCE: They’re going to go to whatever they think they’re going to be able to get whatever you want done in the most efficient way that will tend towards bigger consolidated plays. And so I’m actually optimistic about media. I am terrified for small business. Why do you shop at the small business you shop at? It is typically because it’s either physically convenient for you or because you have some emotional connection to them. Your agent doesn’t give a shit about either of those things.

I think the most interesting question in the next five years is what’s the future business model of the internet? I think that a sub-question of that is what is a brand in a world of agentic commerce? Let’s imagine that you could aggregate, here are all the things that people bought, here’s how many of them were returned, here’s the customer service response rate, packaged up into some cryptographically verifiable thing where an agent can come in and say, “Hey, I’ve never heard of this brand before, but I can see the customers are super happy shopping from it,” and then it rewards that.

If we don’t have that, again, I worry that what we’re headed towards is a world where we’re actually going to crush small businesses. We’re trying to work with the Visas and PayPals and Shopify’s and everyone else in order to say, “How do we get all this signal back in order to be able to identify that?”

For Cloudflare, I mean, we don’t think about our – we’re terrible. We don’t put billboards up. We’re terrible at all of those things. We’re throwing a party tonight and then no one even invited me, so that’s how bad we are at branding. What I tend to think about more is that we’re fundamentally in the business of trust and what we ask people to do is kind of crazy. It’s like, “Route all of your traffic through us and trust us. We’ll handle it all.”

So we have to just be very much aligned on how do we make sure that we live up to our mission? And our mission is to help build a better internet. There are so many times, someone will come in and say, “If you just did X, we’ll give you a hundred million dollars.” Why didn’t we ever get in the advertising business? It could have been huge. Just think cookies, we could have sold it. But at the end of the day –

SAFIAN: It doesn’t make for a better internet.

PRINCE: It doesn’t help build a better internet.

Copy LinkWhy the next internet business model could create huge opportunity

SAFIAN: We’re just about out of time, Matthew, but we’ve talked about a lot of things that maybe might make people a little nervous about the future. That’s what I want to ask you, if you are optimistic.

PRINCE: But the future’s going to be so much better. I guarantee you–

SAFIAN: So what is the opportunity that people aren’t seeing? What makes you optimistic?

PRINCE: You as an individual on your own can build something that will completely change the world and generate generational wealth for you. The ability for a small team to do just absolutely heroic things, it’s never been possible before. There is a world in which we only have one or two AI companies, where journalists, academics, researchers get crushed or go work for one of those big AI companies, which is I’m sure The Black Mirror version of it. But there’s another version where we create a world where anyone can start an AI company, where we make the resources as easy as possible, where everyone can start to create content. And what wins isn’t who pisses people off the most, but who wins is who furthers human knowledge.

If I were the AI companies, I’d be starting the Academy Awards of Content. They should give an award every single year for who advances knowledge the most, and they can measure it mathematically in different fields. And just celebrate that. And we can create a world where we actually then make it so that if you are a great entrepreneur and you build a better mousetrap, that everyone can find you and you can be successful and that you don’t get crushed because somebody’s got a bigger marketing budget than you are because you can actually demonstrate truthfully, not by some advertising shortcut, but truthfully that your product is better. That’s the world we should be building towards.

And I don’t know how to do it, but I think just articulating that we want lots of AI companies, we want lots of content creators, we want lots of businesses large and small competing in a fair market. And that’s what we should be playing for and asking ourselves what we are doing technologically, what we’re doing from a policy perspective, what we’re doing from a regulatory perspective, what we’re doing as consumers is it, are we moving towards that future or away from that future?

The next five years, we’re going to figure out what the future business model of the internet is, and all of you have the opportunity to create that. Imagine how amazing that is. It’s going to completely change. And you don’t ever see systems as big and complicated as that have these massive disruptive changes.

And so again, if you think your job is to argue for manual screwdrivers, you’re not going to have fun over the next 20 years of your life. It’s going to be hard. If on the other hand, you’re like, “Listen, I’m going to be open, I’m going to be curious. I’m going to try these things and I’m going to say that’s the direction of the future, but let’s make it as optimistic and positive as possible.” Again, I am 100% confident that tomorrow’s going to be better than yesterday.

SAFIAN: Well, Matthew, thank you so much.

PRINCE: Thank you.

SAFIAN: I learned something new every time I talk to Matthew about what’s going on behind the scenes in the tech world. I don’t always agree with all of his predictions. The future of journalism that he sees doesn’t quite fit my ideal, but he’s always thought-provoking. One clear takeaway, echoed by my chats with other CEOs, is the changing nature of the workplace. Executives believe that electric screwdrivers are taking over and they’re making decisions with that assumption in mind. Even for those of us who never used a manual screwdriver and who aren’t even trying to screw in screws, the expectations are shifting. Will that be good or bad? As Matthew acknowledges, that in part depends on how we respond. One thing seems pretty certain to me though, it’s going to be a bumpy ride for everyone. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.