No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:14:07 · Dane Knecht
[00:14:07] S0: I mean, yes. I think we do. I think we find ways to deliver the content and agents and humans where they are as opposed to trying to meet them in the same place. Right now, there's translation layers. There's a lot of companies that help an agent view a web page. These are just all extra burning of tokens for things that probably don't need to happen. The website usually knows what data... We've had things like this called... We've had APIs, ways that computers talk to each other for years. APIs only covered a small fraction of the information on the Internet, and agents have a thirst to understand everything. So they're going out and trying to explore the human Internet, and we need to make it easier for them. We need to make it less costly for the site owners, and we need to find a way for them to get compensated. I think it's a world where you can get very simple. Most likely, it's a good content website, like a Substack. They know what their CPM is for how much money they should be making on ads for that site. And so if an agent's reading the site, I think there is a world where you get to the point where an agent can decide whether or not they want to read the content, and then they can decide if they want to pay the CPM rate. Right? And that's where you need to then get new payment rails for the Internet that can do millions of transactions a second for all these little micro payments. All these things that we've been talking about for years, micro payments always are two years away. I think agents will actually push that forward and actually we will see a world where actually there is a new economic model for content creators.
00:16:01 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:16:01] S1: Who do you think the players are or what are the variations of that infrastructure? I think obviously Cloudflare has an important role to play here, but the rise of personal agents like Instinct and Muse have also made this like an immediate question from a transactional perspective. [00:16:20] S0: I don't think everyone knows on the, you know, on the other side what the business outcome is going to look like. You know, everyone's been through these transformations where the Internet, you know, if I was going to kill Main Street, it didn't kill Main Street. There's small businesses that are still thriving. But there weren't people that were displaced. So there's always kind of some skepticism there. And so there's some natural inclination to just block them out. Right? You saw Amazon just say, no personal shopping there from an agent. I I think these are all people that that messy middle where they're trying to figure out what that path forward is and trying to keep some of the negotiation leverage there. I think we will get to a place where Muse and Dots and all those personal agents will be able to accomplish tasks seamlessly as you as a human could do even easier. But I don't know if the technology's quite caught up to that yet and the business models either. [00:17:23] S1: Is there anything you're personally excited about on the roadmap or just from a technical exploration perspective on the Cloudflare front that you feel like is going to enable this ecosystem in the future?
00:17:23 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:17:23] S1: Is there anything you're personally excited about on the roadmap or just from a technical exploration perspective on the Cloudflare front that you feel like is going to enable this ecosystem in the future? [00:17:37] S0: Well, yeah, absolutely. On the content side, we've released a conference monetization gateway where we make it easy for people to put their sites behind us and take microtransactions for their content. Including providing wallets for agents to use and a stablecoin that's going to be able to help facilitate that transaction as well. We're also doing things with OpenAI, a project called signals where we're making it easier for agents to actually discover content instead of having to crawl the entire Internet and continually go back to pages. We're making it easier for them to know what's new content and actually kind of more proactive to do that. So it's a win for the AI labs as well as a win for the site owners not having to get constantly crawled and pay for that infrastructure. So there's a whole set of new laws on the Internet that I'm really excited to see all those of grow to see X402 from when Stripe came out with it, I loved it because it went back to the four zero two HTTP code, which was Tim Burns Lee created twenty plus years ago or thirty plus years ago for payments. So you kind of always knew that you needed a better payments rail on the Internet, but we haven't been able to kind of figure it out. And I think agents will lead us to that as well.
00:19:09 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:19:09] S1: When you think about these initial products that you've released, is there... What what would success for a content creator or somebody who ostensibly had a website on the Internet that they were monetizing with ads before? Like, what's the what's the killer success case you guys need to see or show the world where it just becomes like a default to do this? [00:19:33] S0: Well, I mean, I think we're instead of them paying us, we're paying them. Right? Where it's covering their infrastructure costs, it's providing money that supports their livelihood. We can actually increase the number of content creators out there, which the last generation of the Internet has done very well, like with YouTube and TikTok and it's... I mean, actually making it even exponentially larger. [00:20:03] S1: And when you look at the Workspace OS release and ecosystem work that you guys have been doing, what is... What are you hoping are the biggest use cases of it coming up?
00:20:03 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:20:03] S1: And when you look at the Workspace OS release and ecosystem work that you guys have been doing, what is... What are you hoping are the biggest use cases of it coming up? [00:20:17] S0: This is transitioning a little to a new release called Cloudflare OS. And Cloudflare OS is our internal platform for how our employees use AI every day, where we... And it actually goes back to security roots where we were very worried about customer data, internal data leaking out, and we wanted to make sure that our employees could use all the new AI tools and models, but have a way to safely deploy them internally to understand how that data is being used and flowing and good governance over that. In addition, the reason my company called CloudflareOS is we started to realize that as we have more and more agents, we needed to be able to teach them what made Cloudflare special, how we build at Cloudflare. And for humans, we did that through Cloudflare University and the onboarding process and meeting your colleagues and working with them. But we needed to kind of more clearly define that and document that for agents. And so Cloudflare OS is both the platform where our employees can build anything that they want in a secure way without having to... Security is not something that they have to think about. The BER that's trying to create a call list, they don't have to worry about security. It's just built in there for them. But they also know that it's being done in a way that is consistent with the themes and values of how software works.
00:21:42 · Sarah Guo, Dane Knecht
[00:21:42] S1: And why release... I think of this as somewhat different from the other products that Cloudflare offers today in that it is not infrastructure. It's like an end user facing product for managing AI use within the organization. Why release it? Or do you think of it as a departure? [00:22:01] S0: Yeah. I mean, for one, it's kind of reference architecture really. Over the past ten years, we've built our developer platform where we started with just a simple serverless compute primitive and now over 100 different developer platform tools from storage to databases to durable objects. We wanted to show how you can build it completely on Cloudflare and how we build things internally and kind of give people the option to fork it and build their own version of their own company OS on top of it. [00:22:40] S1: And what is a way in which it is helping your people and your organization that you think is like clear success?