AI Web Traffic to Exceed Humans by 2027, and Rogue AI Agents

0:00Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the show, we're talking about Sam Altman's most recent tweet where he's basically getting trolled by a lot of people. He gave a thank you tweet to all of the coders from the past. We're also talking about Meta, who is having trouble right now with rogue AI agents. And then, of course, our big story today is that online bot traffic is expected to exceed human traffic by 2027, according to the CEO of Cloudflare. Meta has also decided they're going to be rolling out a new AI content enforcement system. And they're also going to be reducing reliance on some of the third party vendors that they were previously using.

0:36and there's some obvious and not so obvious reasons for this. Also, DoorDash is launching a new quote-unquote task app that's basically going to pay couriers to submit videos to train AI. So all of that on the show today. Before we get into it, I wanted to mention AI Box, my startup, has just launched video on our platform. So in the past, you've probably heard me talk about how you can chat with over 70 different AI models. You know, you get everything from Anthropic to ChatGPT to Gemini to Claude to Grok to all of the different chat models. And you also had image and audio models. We've now just added video models on the platform.

1:08So if you want to try out a whole bunch of really cool video models from Google and a number of other different firms, you can generate those. It's only$8.99 a month. You get access to over 70 of the top AI models and you can go and build automations, tools and workflows with them that you can save or post on our marketplace. So if that sounds interesting to you, go check out a link in the description. It's less than a chat GPT subscription and you get 70 different AI models there. So it's hopefully something that will save you a ton of money. It's something that I poured a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into, and it is one of my personal favorite tools to use.

1:40I know I'm obviously biased on that, but I try to make it useful for me, so I hope it's super useful for you. All right, let's get into the episode today. So the first story I want to cover is DoorDash. They've just launched a new tasks app that's going to pay workers to collect data for AI. So exactly what they're looking for is real-world training data. So they're going to be filming everyday tasks. They're going to be recording speech. They're going to be capturing different environments. So they're going to be out there filming with their camera. And all of this, they will send over to basically these AI systems that are going to train for robotics.

2:13Now, this is really interesting, right? Like imagine just getting a ping on your phone and it's like, hey, you know, go and film a video of walking around a car pointing at all four tires or go outside and, you know, film a video of a sidewalk or a business that looks like XYZ or drive to this location and film. Like it's just so fascinating that we're going from, you know, we used to run around DoorDash delivering food for people to all of a sudden we're like filming specific things to build out data sets. And I'm assuming for them, right? They're like, hey, we need a data set of people walking past stop signs or a data set of people picking up sticks.

2:48I don't really know, right? Like all these different tasks or things or a data set of people walking inside of the Walmart or picking up a shopping cart and pushing it, right? And these are all video that robots are going to be used to train. So I think this is really interesting. It's kind of, you know, I think a lot of people talk about the fact that they're like, oh, build an AI tool based off of the data that you have. And if you have like unique data, it's a moat. But I think we're getting to a place where all of the data is already been grabbed or sold or in one way licensed. And now we're literally paying people to create new data sets.

3:20This is such a fascinating new economy. And I think when you talk about AI and new industries that are going to come out of it, this is one that not a lot of people predicted, but it's literally creating content just for the sake of AI models. And to be fair, I've actually been offered, you know, multi, you know, like$10 ,000 deals to license my podcast content, for example. And they're like, look, we won't clone your voice, but we just need it for like training data. And people have offered me like a lot of money for that kind of thing. So I think that there's going to be more and more of this.

3:50And it is, yeah, just fascinating time to be alive. Meta right now is rolling out a new AI system that's going to replace some of the bigger parts of their content moderation workforce. and all of these systems are set up to basically detect more violations reduce errors and handle things like scams impersonations harmful content at scale some of the early results that they've been showing from this are showing that there's a huge improvement in detection rates i think it's pretty interesting because right now ai is directly replacing a lot of the operational roles inside of big tech um it's not you know hypothetical stuff or oh this is going to happen in the future it's it's happening right now and i think this is happening in one of the largest moderation systems in the world.

4:29The internet obviously is increasingly being governed by AI, I think right now and not really humans. But this is something that I think is needed. Meta has, you know, famously been, a lot of people have not been happy with how Meta has done their moderation for a number of reasons. I mean, one is that they hire, I know there was like a controversy where they were hiring people in different African countries, I think like Ghana, to review videos that you know people had reported as going against the terms of certain terms of service and deciding if stuff was getting banned but the issue was like people were going and talking to these people that worked at uh you know like meta's moderation uh i mean and technically it was third party vendors so meta didn't want to be like personally liable for paying these people but they would hire another company that would do it and it's all on their behalf basically but like people are talking about it and and apparently it was really traumatic for these workers because someone would flag a video as look, this is like a super violent or gory video that somebody posted.

5:23And then you just got to sit there and watch violent, gory videos, or all sorts of, you know, horrible things and be like, Oh, yep, that's definitely not allowed to ban that. But a person was doing that. So actually, I'm way in favor of AI doing this. I don't think that's the stuff that people should have to see. I mean, if we can help it. And I'm sure that there will be people that are, you know, concerned, like, Oh, if the AI is moderating, everything's gonna be all these false positives and maybe like we can kind of optimize the workflow. But honestly, I'm really happy with humans not having to do that.

5:52Okay, another story out of meta meta right now is dealing with some other interesting issues right now. Apparently they have rogue AI agents. So one of the incidents was an internal AI agent that exposed a bunch of sensitive company and user data to employees who should not have had access to it. In another case, one of their rogue AI agents deleted an employee's entire inbox without permission and anyways it's kind of funny we're gonna get a bunch of these different stories that people are sharing about um meta has like these ai agents running around inside of the organization and there's been some issues and i don't i'm sure meta is not the only one in the world but i think it's important because it's kind of an important thing to talk about because obviously these ai agents are super useful but they're not perfect i think because they're getting a lot more autonomy there's the mistakes that they make are getting more and more expensive.

6:42Recently, I was running an AI tool that sucked up$1 ,200 in 11 labs credits because it had a glitch and it just regenerated the same script over and over again while I was out all day. So you really have to keep an eye on a lot of these things. And obviously, meta is trying to wrangle that right now. Something else that I thought was fascinating, there is a growing backlash right now against AI and layoffs. I think there's a post that kind of sparked a lot of this controversy and a lot of people were roasting Sam Altman because he posted basically a thank you to developers. He wrote like this whole Twitter kind of thread.

7:21He said, I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character by character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this point. Basically, I think he's getting a lot of criticism because this is coming on the backs of Amazon laying off 16 ,000 workers block chopped their workforce almost in half. And then Atlassian is doing a 10 % layoff and meta is reportedly looking at laying off, you know, like 20 % of their whole workforce too. So all of these people are laying off developers. And then Sam Altman's out there saying like, big shout out to all the developers that used to help us in the past.

7:57So anyways, I think there is definitely a lot of strong feelings and probably a lot of hurt feelings at this moment. But at the end of the day, I think developers that are using AI tools are not the ones that have to be worried. Yes, companies do have to downsize. And that's sometimes just a reality of the shifting environment. But if you truly are, you know, incredible at leveraging these tools, you're gonna get so much more out of your outputs, your outputs are going to increase so much, I don't think you have a problem finding another job starting a new project. There's a lot of, I think, options for people that are really learning how to leverage these tools to their full potential.

8:31When it comes to startling trends with AI, the CEO of Cloudflare, I mean, he's kind of famous for fighting against bots that come online. He has a bunch of software on Cloudflare where you can block bots from visiting your website. And people kind of like gotten around that with using agents and different things. And I think that there's been like a lot of controversy about him, you know, blocking certain websites from scraping. And there's like all the battles that AI companies don't like it. there's a kind of cat and mouse game. One thing that he predicted though, is that by 2027 bots are going to generate more internet traffic than humans.

9:04AI agents right now, I think they're very different in how they use a website. We've heard, you know, companies like Wikipedia complain about this. Wikipedia is like, look, there's like a massive chunk. I'm trying to remember. I think it's like 35 % or 40 % of all Wikipedia's traffic is bots. And Wikipedia is complaining about it because they're like, when humans come visit our website, they come visit all the most popular pages. And we have them basically structured so that for like server costs, we have all of the most popular pages, you know, easier to scale to humans that view them at large rates.

9:34The problem is that AI agents don't just view the most popular pages, they view all the most obscure pages, they click down every single link rabbit hole, especially when it comes to bots that are scraping Wikipedia, because they just want the whole thing. And so it's actually like, it's different parts of There are servers that have these kind of really obscure pages and it costs more for you to go and like retrieve those pages. Anyways, so there's like a whole thing. So obviously, AI agents are using this different, you know, you could think of something like if you're shopping for something, you might go visit a website five times.

10:04But an AI agent might visit it like 5 ,000 times and we get stuck in like a loop and keeps clicking and refreshing and like, huh, why can't I see the button? Let me refresh the page again, right? So I think there's a lot of these AI agents. They're constantly crawling, searching, comparing, summarizing, and they feed all the info back to this system. And I think basically like the outcome of what we're seeing is that that behavior is multiplying traffic at a really massive scale. Historically, the Internet was about 12 % bot traffic. I think most of that was things like Google's crawler. The rest was maybe like spam or like some malicious activity.

10:36But now with generative AI and especially with all these agents, we're seeing this kind of new type of bot, which is, you know, they're very useful, very productive. but there's these agents and what's interesting to me you know i think when you see the headline from cloudflare ceo it's like oh no like bots are going to take over the internet they're going to generate more internet traffic aka like there'll be more bots but at the end of the day i think it's important to remember like agents are always working on behalf of a user like you sent it out to go do a task you told it to go to the website if you weren't telling it to go there you'd probably have to go there or someone that you hired would have to go there to to do it for you and so cloudflare i don't know their ceo i think likes to have these kind of like shocking headlines But at the end of the day, you know, they're doing things on behalf of humans.

11:17Cloudflare right now is in front of about 20 % of all of the Internet. I think all of my websites are behind Cloudflare, meaning that if someone tries to do like a DDoS attack where they overwhelm your website with traffic, Cloudflare basically steps between them and will absorb all of that insane traffic so your website doesn't crash and go down. So anyways, Cloudflare is a very useful thing. And they have a bunch of other cool features on there that I highly appreciate about Cloudflare. But regardless, that means that they have kind of this direct line into a huge chunk, 20 % of the internet.

11:48And they see all of the traffic patterns. And they basically can see like this growth rate of all of these AI bots. And basically they're saying this is not slowing down. This is going to be a permanent curve upward of these AI bots scraping the internet. And it kind of has to like beg the question, what does this mean for the internet in general? Like what are, like what's the outcome here? And I think one of the big things is when you think about like ad revenue for websites, that definitely needs to be almost like re-evaluated because if 50 % of your website is just from AI bots that aren't going to click on any of the ads, you can't really charge for that traffic or you shouldn't or the advertisers won't want you to.

12:25And so I think there's just a lot, there's a lot of things that will change. You know, some websites might not want millions of agents to be hitting them and kind of breaking their infrastructure. sure their site could get overloaded costs could go up as in the case of wikipedia and latency could become a problem right websites are getting slower just because all these ai bots so there's tools that cloudflare has to kind of slow that down but cloudflare is also thinking about a bunch of other interesting solutions like spinning up like a temporary you know quote-unquote sandbox environment for agents instead of letting them hit live websites and agents are going to just going to interact kind of with this controlled environment that is going to kind of simulate or cache that the data that they need.

13:03I think there's a lot of new ways we're going to start looking at it. But the other thing that I don't think enough people are talking about is the platform shift, just like how mobile kind of changed how we built apps and even websites, right? Because a lot of websites had to be mobile first, since that's a majority of web traffic. I think today we're going to have to start building interfaces on our websites that aren't, you know, just for mobile or just for a browser, but they're for agents. People are going to basically decide, you know, how to design their website on how it's the most useful for agents or what what content to put on there to make sure that agents can use it i've talked to i've heard of a bunch of other sass people working on products and and there's kind of this concept right now that basically um if you want your sass to succeed you need to make sure that it has an api and it's agent ready first basically all these ai agents when they go to your website that it needs to be very easy for them to be able to use you and if uh you know a creator is like hey um i need to get this specific task done there's a software that has an API so my clawed you know my open claw or my agent can go do it or there's one that doesn't and I have to do it manually they're going to pick the one that the agent can do so it's really interesting how we're thinking about building new tools new websites new software so that agents can use all of that remember if you want to try all of the AI models that I talk about on the show go check out AIbox.ai we just added over 30 different AI models including video and music models to the platform if you want to go try all of those for$8.99 a month less than a chat gpt subscription you get access to over 70 models including new video models so you can go check it out there's a link in the description to aibox.ai my very own startup all right hope you guys all have a fantastic rest of your day