During the SXSW conference in Austin, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince asserted that the internet is being taken over by bots. In his estimation, the volume of traffic generated by artificial intelligence-based bots is set to surpass human traffic by the year 2027, assuming current industry development rates persist.
Image Source: Gemini
Image Source: Gemini
Prince explained that bot activity online is escalating concurrently with advances in generative AI technologies. A contributing factor is that bots generating responses to user queries can visit far more websites than human users can. “If a person were tasked with, for example, sourcing a digital camera, they might look at five websites. Your agent or bot completing that same task will often visit a thousand times more sites than a real person. So, it might hit 5,000 sites. And that is real traffic, and it’s real load that everyone has to deal with and account for,” Prince stated.
He further noted that prior to the generative AI era, bots constituted no more than 20% of traffic, with Google’s search crawler being the largest component. The majority of these bots were associated with fraudsters and malicious actors. “With the evolution of generative AI and its insatiable appetite for data, we are witnessing a surge that leads us to project that by 2027, the volume of internet bot traffic will eclipse human traffic,” Prince believes.
He pointed out that this shift will necessitate the creation of new technologies, such as “sandboxes” for AI agents, which can be rapidly instantiated and decommissioned once their task is complete. These might become essential when users delegate actions to an AI agent, such as planning a vacation. “We are trying to think about how to build this foundational infrastructure that allows you, as easily as opening a new browser tab, to generate new code that can then run and serve those agents,” Prince explained. He also speculated that the imminent future will see millions of such AI agent sandboxes being spun up every second.
The large-scale utilization of the internet by bots will mandate an expansion of physical infrastructure, specifically the construction of new data centers. Prince drew a parallel to the rapid surge in traffic volume observed during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially from video services like YouTube or Netflix. Even then, this placed certain parts of the internet at risk of collapse due to the strain. “The growth now is more gradual, but unlike COVID, where it spiked dramatically in two weeks and then plateaued at a new high, we are seeing internet traffic continually increase, and we don’t see anything that suggests a slowdown or halt,” Prince commented.
“I think people don’t fully grasp that AI represents a platform shift. AI is another platform shift… the very manner in which you will consume information will fundamentally change,” concluded the head of Cloudflare.
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