The Exchanges

Q Amazing. And I, I don't think there's a way to ask this question without, like, somewhat trivializing the journey, but, like, how did you become so dominant?

A I don't know. I, I mean, I think we just focused on how did we do the right thing for our customers? How do we solve the problems that were there? And, you know, at some level the story of Cloudflare is that Um, our, we have been customer zero along the entire journey. So every, you know, thing that started from, could we take a firewall, put it in the cloud? How would we get the data to populate that firewall? We had to have a free service. Once we had a free service, all of a sudden we had to be able to figure out how to scale, um, you know, enormously across, you know, millions of customers, uh, in, in an efficient way. That meant that we had a whole bunch of, you know, weird stuff that was using us. We got attacked by Every which direction. We had to build a public policy team in order to deal with those issues. We had to build our own security. We, like, someone almost hacked or stole our domain at some point as a way of hacking into us. So the next thing you know, we built our own registrar. And so to some extent, Cloudflare has been about, you know, start with a relatively simple idea, um, make it as broadly available as possible, and then solve all the problems that become sort of inherent once you've done that.

AI assessment note: “we have been customer zero along the entire journey”

Q at least expert content that you mentioned, um, if you look at some of the models like MedPalm II from Google, which is a couple years old now, it outperformed human physicians, the average human physician in terms of output. So if you rated its output against people, at what point do you think we've run out of good content from people? In other words, there, there is some limit

A I don't think that's true. I mean, I do think that there, there will be some, like there's always going to be people running new experiments and new tests and finding new things and, and new discoveries. And yeah, maybe we can imagine some distant future where it's all robots that are, that are doing this in, in, in the labs, but that's, that's a long ways off. And so in, in the meantime, you know, I think we can do that. My, my black mirror kind of version of the future though, Is, is actually one where we're not going to get rid of journalists. We're not going to get rid of scientists. We're not going to get rid of researchers. You're going to still need that work. What I worry about is we don't figure out how to compensate broadly content creators who are independent, that we actually go back to almost a time in the Medici's where the web had historically been this incredible sort of, um, distributor of value of creation and, and knowledge creation. You could imagine a world in which All of a sudden you have five big AI companies. You have the conservative one, and you have the liberal one, you have the European one, and the Chinese one, and, and they all actually hire and run their own team of journalists, researchers, academics, the experts that fill in the cheat, the sorts of holes in their cheese. And, and again, that's not too hard to imagine that in some not so distant…

AI assessment note: “I don't think that's true... there's always going to be people running new experiments”

Q Does that imply any particular belief around like open or closed models as, you know, people continue to develop capabilities?

A You know, we have closed models that run on us. Um, We have a lot more open models that run on us. Um, I, I tend to, um, we, we have historically been a, a company that believes very much in open source. And we, most of the things that we build internally, um, as long as, as long as we can, we try to open source all of that technology. And so I, I tend to be in the pro open models. Um, you know, we work very closely with the meta team and llama and, And everything that they're, they're doing. But again, I think there's going to be different, different flavors of this. And, and I, you know, again, I, I'm, we're happy to have customers in either end of, of that, that spectrum. I'm, I'm a little bit skeptical. I'm actually quite skeptical of the, if we allow open source models, the world is going to end arguments. That seems histrionic to me. There are things we should worry about. Like it is, you know, I, I think some of the, um, you know, uh, synthetic pathogens and other things that can be created, but It seems to me like the, the place to regulate that and control that is in the machine that can actually print the pathogens, not in the AI model that can come up with, with, uh, with, with what it is. That, that seems like a, a pretty flimsy argument for why we shouldn't have open source.

AI assessment note: “I tend to be in the pro open models.”

Q And they can't, it's not easy to predict what is incremental to models. What advice would you have for them?

A So I think the first thing is you've got to, you've, you've got to get back to controlling your content. So you have to create scarcity from the beginning. So how do you make sure that you're not just giving your content away for free? And again, we've made that easy. There are other companies, uh, that are working to try and make that easy, um, as well. And so one way or another creates scarcity and then start to have conversations. You can see which AI companies are the most likely, uh, to, to deal with it. So we're, you know, just today there was news that Google is starting Uh, pilot project to start to pay news providers, something they swore they would never do. Um, but again, I think that they can see, and because they do believe in the ecosystem, they can see that this has to happen. If the incentives for creating content go away, if you can no longer sell something, if you can no longer sell ads against something, if you can no longer even get the ego hit, because if people aren't going to the original source, you don't even know. If you write some incredibly influential piece that ends up in, you know, millions of AI responses, You don't actually ever even know that happened. You're, you're yelling into the void. We've got to figure something out around that, uh, around that piece. So I think the first step for content creators is recognize that you have a, that the b…

AI assessment note: “you've got to get back to controlling your content. So you have to create scarcity”

Q Now you're in the position that I believe you've described as like the internet's traffic cop. I think a lot of people feel with the, um, sucking sound of attention toward AI assistance that the shape of the internet is changing. Um, what is your, before we go to like point of view on what to do, what is your prediction for what's happening?

A Uh, so no matter what, um, the, the dominant kind of value creation model of the last 30 years of the web Has been search. Search drove everything. It drove, uh, all of what you did online. Entire industries grew up around that. And the real three ways that you could drive value on the web in the past were you either sold a thing, whether that was a subscription or a product or something else. You sold ads against some content or, and I didn't say the business model, but I said the value creation model, because the third part is really important, which is a lot of people just created content For the ego of knowing that other people were doing the, you know, the old adage is only two reasons why people create content to get rich or to get famous. A lot of people are just doing it to get famous, and that's a lot of what drove. I mean, that's what drives Wikipedia. That's what drives a lot of content creation that is on the web. I think that the web is shifting now to a new interface. It's shifting away from search and shifting to AI, and we can see that through Uh, the trends in terms of Google usage. We can see that in terms of like our own usage, um, where more and more people are turning to these AI systems where they used to turn to Google. Even Google itself is sort of morphing into an AI company kind of in their, in their interface before our eyes. And as we do that, the na…

AI assessment note: “I think that the web is shifting now to a new interface.”

Q Does that, um, advancement, uh, happen at the model providers in open source at an infrastructure provider?

A I mean, I, it's hard to predict where it is. I mean, I know that that's like, we're not investing in how we build a frontier model. That's not, that's not our job. We are investing on how we take any models that, that we're running and, and run them significantly more efficiently. So that's, that's how we think about it. I think, I think the question is who's going to be the VMware of AI, right? And who's going to create Kind of that ability to just because we haven't even done that basic work. Like today, for the most part, if you want to, you know, spin up a, uh, a, a GPU, you're taking an entire, you know, VM. There's not even a container because you've got to get that low level or you're taking an entire machine that is, is running and that's extremely expensive. And in most cases with most of the hyperscalers, you actually have to, to get anything close to attractive pricing. You have to commit to a year Of, of that. And now it's up to you as a customer to figure out all that efficiency. Someone will come along and figure out a way to say, here's how we can slice these things up. Here's how we can make them more efficient. And we're just going to speed run essentially the CPU efficiency gains, including a lot of the security things like the, um, specter and, and other attacks, the speculative attacks that you had in, in CPUs will come to GPUs that all that stuff is coming.…

AI assessment note: “who's going to be the VMware of AI, right?”