00:30:05 · Parag Agrawal, Molly O'Shea
So we have a highly opinionated point of view on how we keep the web open on how we incentive align content owners with the AI app or AI agent so that the content owner isn't sitting there saying, I'm going to block all the agents because I don't know how to, how that becomes business for me. Right. So we need to solve this problem for people, which is like, okay, give me an incentive to make my content available to AI agents. What is that? We built a system which runs a model, not surprising to compute how much to pay each content owner every time an agent reads their content. And we've been now doing a bunch of partnership with content owners. And the bet we are making is that we'll be able to keep the web open as a result of our version of, we can call it AdSense, which is easy auto differential pricing actually provides content owner value for high quality content. [00:31:10] S1: That's a really good point. I was interviewing USV Union Square Ventures not too long ago, and Fred Wilson was talking about how Google, the traditional business there is being cannibalized by AI, LLMs, agents. It just is. And so Gemini is like the Hail Mary to pull it in. And they're emphasizing that and they're taking advantage of that. I'm curious to go deeper into this monetization standpoint. In another interview I did at Browserbase with John Collison of Stripe, he posed the question, do we need bot detection anymore? There's obviously good bots, there's bad bots, but if everything, all the traffic becomes essentially bots, these agents, like what is the point?
00:31:59 · Parag Agrawal
[00:31:59] S2: Yeah, no, I think today there's a lot of people doing a lot of bot detection. The word bot detection, I think is a few different things. It is crawlers. It is actual agents working on behalf of a human or a business. It is malicious bots, which are trying to do harm. So I think we have to use that word now a little bit more carefully than we have in the past because historically people have mostly had negative connotations with that word in that, like it's not serving anyone. Yeah. Today there's a category which is actually highly useful for you or for me. I would like my agents to inherit privileges I have. So I think we should be careful. I do think there is like a bot detection market is doing well right now and doing well right now because we haven't figured out how to do incentive alignment. And there's a a separate kind of incentive alignment needed. Let's call it on the action side. So earlier I spoke about the incentive alignment needed on the content side, which is like, why do I let you read my content? The other side is what happens if I let your agent buy on my store And you're starting to see divergent strategies there. I'm of the belief that we need to figure out how to solve problems so that all agents, not just the ones built by a large lab can both access all content and take all actions that their owner is allowed to. Right? But we're not there right now.
00:33:46 · Molly O'Shea, Parag Agrawal
[00:33:46] S1: One of the biggest topics behind growth is cyber security and active threats. How do you I know you said you're an optimist, but realistically, like, how do you see the biggest concerns around this? [00:34:02] S2: No, I think cybersecurity risks are real. I think agents help both defenders and attackers. Problem always is that the people who rush ahead to adopt agents for defending themselves, I think will be fine because attackers like to find the weakest link and there will always be a weakest link. So broadly, that's what I think. Now, the security risk for something highly sensitive, like the model weights of a frontier model are a whole different conversation. Yeah. But by and large, my intuition is that we will use coding agents aggressively to secure. But along the way, there's going to be a cyber event every few weeks of consequence, which will drive action and urgency in getting ahead on defence. We're going to spend a bunch of influence on both attack and defence. [00:35:21] S1: Do you see any of this analogous to your time at Twitter on consumer internet? Obviously, that's a huge, one of the largest social media platforms, and so, that creates a lot of vulnerabilities.
00:35:21 · Molly O'Shea, Parag Agrawal
[00:35:21] S1: Do you see any of this analogous to your time at Twitter on consumer internet? Obviously, that's a huge, one of the largest social media platforms, and so, that creates a lot of vulnerabilities. [00:35:35] S2: No, all of the... There are obviously parallels, right? Not to just keep calling out my company's name again and again. There was a real incentive to attack, whether it were crypto spams. Those were popular for a period, right? Or whether it was some state sponsored influence campaign, which we used to disclose a lot publicly. Those things always happened. It required real energy focus to control. It is, the thing most people don't understand is, it is almost impossible to take it to zero. You have to contain it because it is a knife fight and the tactics change. Anytime you control some vectors, another new vector will emerge and then you will control that. The other thing people don't understand is most of the bad stuff is stuff that doesn't show up on the surface. So if you saw an account and thought this is a bot, it's harmless because you could see that's bot. So the real problem is going to be in the margins when we lose our ability to differentiate. Yeah. Either as people or as the technical people building these systems, when you can't differentiate a human from a bot or an agent, that's when you're like, okay, now I don't know what I'm up against. And I think that is very similar today that we used to deal with back then. [00:37:21] S1: Do you think bots should address themselves?
00:37:21 · Molly O'Shea, Parag Agrawal
[00:37:21] S1: Do you think bots should address themselves? [00:37:24] S2: I have two contradictory feelings about this. I do think good bots should declare themselves, so that others can recognize them as good bots, and treat them differently from bots that might be adversarial. And we keep using the word bots, I would like to use the word agent. [00:37:46] S1: Okay, well, every time we use bots, I really think
00:37:48 · Parag Agrawal
[00:37:48] S2: use bot has a more negative connotation, while an agent is a more appropriate word. I think agents are perhaps the good bots. Mostly. Yeah. The... So, yeah, I think they should declare themselves. I know there's like a bunch of protocols now being done around declaring identity or the world at large. The core challenge there, why the other side is like, there's a conceptual question. Should your agent have the same access as you? Should it inherit your access or should it have only a part of your access? Now, would really, it would be so much better if we could figure out a way to get rid of the bad bots, but live in a world where we could enable our agents to have the access we have and grant that privilege. Today it's strange, right? Like I can't get my instinct or muse to have the access I have on many websites because they got blocked there and they will get even more blocked if they started declaring themselves. Yeah. And that is why I think we're in this moment of transition where these products have these rough edges, partly because we haven't done incentive alignment. But if we started just declaring them everywhere and they've started declaring themselves everywhere, like we don't participate in that space, but we started doing that. A bunch of people today, we haven't done the work to do business model alignment are going to start blocking this. Yeah. And so these products then will look worse and be less useful and that sucks. So to me, the existential problem is how do we drive alignment between agents and everything on the web.