01:36:49 路 Matthew Prince
[01:36:49] S13: Yeah. I mean, was I the at end of last year, so end of of twenty twenty five, I said that I I thought that we would pass he it it bought traffic, and and that's that's, you know, across the board. So that's, like, Google's crawler, but also, you know, the new agents which are which are coming out. I thought would would pass human traffic by the end of twenty twenty seven. About three months ago, I revised that based on the traffic that we were seeing to say that it would actually be in the first half of twenty twenty seven. And so the fact that it actually happened in the first half of twenty twenty six is just is just it's just been extraordinary, and it just shows how quickly this this is is growing. And and the and the real key here is that I think that if, you know, you or I as humans were researching to go buy a digital camera or something, we might visit five websites and do, you know, a little bit of research and some price comparison. You know, you just watch as you use these agents. They have boundless attention to be able to just go to maybe 5,000 websites to find exactly what what you're you're looking for, the best price, the best delivery, the best service, and everything that's that's there. And so that's just driving an enormous amount of consumption of of of the Internet. At the same time, the other thing that's happening is that for a long time, since about 2015, the the web has kind of plateaued. There were not there were there were more websites that were being shut down than were being created during that time. In the last eighteen months, though, we're we're back to the the web growing at a rate which is is exponential. And and what and and it looks sort of similar to what what was happening back in the early two thousands in terms of in terms of growth of the web. And so I think you're seeing both more sort of consumption of what's online, but you're also seeing more things online as it as it goes forward. And so in both of those directions, you know, that's that's that's gonna continue to just drive, you know, more and more use of of the of the Internet. And and I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, going going, you know, forward, say, five years, that that bot traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online. And we've and we've gotta make sure that we make the Internet work for for that new future.
01:39:02 路 John Coogan, S10, Matthew Prince
[01:39:02] S1: Yeah. Like every year we're just gonna add another nine to the nine nine 99.999% of Internet traffic is bots. Yep. Do you do you know what the baseline was? Like pre AI, were we at like 1% bot traffic? I mean, I've said No. [01:39:17] S10: Was was more it [01:39:19] S13: was more than that. It was about 20% Okay. For for us for a long time. So it yes. And it's you know, Google was the was the largest. And then and then obviously, there's a lot of of malicious things that that run around online. But that was that was around what what it was for and it was pretty stable over, you know, the history of Cloudflare at least, so where where we could measure it. So so since 2010, you know, it was always kind of around that 20% range. Mhmm. And then and then it's and then it's grown. You know, it's it's in the last few years, it started growing steadily, then it really accelerated in the first half of of twenty twenty six.
01:39:19 路 Matthew Prince, John Coogan
[01:39:19] S13: was more than that. It was about 20% Okay. For for us for a long time. So it yes. And it's you know, Google was the was the largest. And then and then obviously, there's a lot of of malicious things that that run around online. But that was that was around what what it was for and it was pretty stable over, you know, the history of Cloudflare at least, so where where we could measure it. So so since 2010, you know, it was always kind of around that 20% range. Mhmm. And then and then it's and then it's grown. You know, it's it's in the last few years, it started growing steadily, then it really accelerated in the first half of of twenty twenty six. [01:39:53] S1: I wanna talk about the inference stack, I guess. Like, we're seeing two things play out, sort of a bifurcation, like a WWDC, Apple's launching on device inference that's it's not going to be frontier, but it's going to be usable for sure on your phone, on a computer. They can obviously go to the private cloud as well. And then you have like the new NVL 72 models. There's stuff in between, a Cerebras chip, fast but expensive. Then there's everything from, oh, it runs on commodity hardware, but it's still pretty big. You need a real desktop for it. And I'm wondering about how you see Cloudflare fitting into that. It would be a logical extension to Cloudflare workers to have inference on the edge, inference in different places. Like, where do you see yourself offering inference, if at all?
01:39:53 路 John Coogan, Matthew Prince
[01:39:53] S1: I wanna talk about the inference stack, I guess. Like, we're seeing two things play out, sort of a bifurcation, like a WWDC, Apple's launching on device inference that's it's not going to be frontier, but it's going to be usable for sure on your phone, on a computer. They can obviously go to the private cloud as well. And then you have like the new NVL 72 models. There's stuff in between, a Cerebras chip, fast but expensive. Then there's everything from, oh, it runs on commodity hardware, but it's still pretty big. You need a real desktop for it. And I'm wondering about how you see Cloudflare fitting into that. It would be a logical extension to Cloudflare workers to have inference on the edge, inference in different places. Like, where do you see yourself offering inference, if at all? [01:40:47] S13: Yeah. Well, we we we it's it's actually kind of funny. Yeah. Back in 2022, we we issued a a press release that there was a graphics chips company that we were gonna partner with in order to put GPUs at the edge edge of our network. [01:41:04] S1: Yeah. [01:41:05] S13: And that graphics chip company [01:41:06] S1: turned Little into bit of Nvidia. Nvidia. Yeah. [01:41:08] S13: And and and what was what was amazing was at the time, it was just crickets, like nobody cared. [01:41:14] S1: Sure.
01:41:14 路 John Coogan, Matthew Prince
[01:41:14] S1: Sure. [01:41:14] S13: And but but we we had we had and and so we we sort of did a little of it, but we hadn't really Yeah. Rolled it out broadly. And and what was funny was and then you fast forward two years later, and all of a sudden everyone cared. And so we we basically just reissued the exact same press release. [01:41:29] S1: Mhmm.
01:41:29 路 Matthew Prince
[01:41:29] S13: And and and now, you know, that's become that's become a pretty pretty important part of our our our business. And so today, you can run inference at the edge of Cloudflare. Yep. And because of the fact that we're, you know, in over 300 cities worldwide, you know, we're within within milliseconds of the vast majority of the world's population, we become a very natural place for inference to happen. I my my working assumption has always been that about 50% of the inference that happens will be on device, whether that's your your phone or your or your laptop or or whatever. But then there needs to be some standard protocol where your phone or your laptop or whatever that local thing is can hand those either long running tasks or larger tasks off next to the network, and so that would be to us. And then if if for some reason you need something that's more than that, then it could handle it back to, you know, some centralized data center with, you know, with with more more capacity than than we may have. And I think that that that's what that's what we're increasingly seeing. I think my my assumption was a little bit probably off. I think actually, I think less is gonna happen on device today because I think more and more of the tasks are going to be these long running Yeah. Task where it's not gonna be just, you know, what what's, you know, what's the, you know, what's the temperature in in New York today. Yeah. Instead, it's gonna be something like, help help me plan a a vacation, go you know, take into account all of these different things, shop for, you know, different hotels in different places, plan all the plan all the, the the travel between between the different locations. Here are the criteria I have. And that might be something that takes, you know, maybe, you know, certainly not not gonna be seconds. It may might be, you know, minutes or hours or days in some cases to run-in that case.