Online Bot Traffic Will Exceed Human Traffic By 2027, Cloudflare CEO Says 51
Cloudflare's CEO predicts AI-driven bot traffic will surpass human internet traffic by 2027, as AI agents generate vastly more web requests than people. "If a human were doing a task -- let's say you were shopping for a digital camera -- and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that's doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in an interview at SXSW this week. "So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that's real traffic, and that's real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account." TechCrunch reports: Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google's web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company is used by one-fifth of all websites. But beyond some other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and bad actors. "With the rise of generative AI, and its just insatiable need for data, we're seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that's online," Prince said.
The executive also noted that this change to the web would require the development of new technologies, like sandboxes for AI agents that can be spun up on the fly and then torn down when their task has finished. These could come into play when consumers ask AI agents to perform certain tasks on their behalf, like planning a vacation. "What we're trying to think about is, how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can -- as easily as you open a new tab in your browser -- you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there," Prince said. He imagines there will soon be a time when millions of these "sandboxes" for agents would be created every second. "I think the thing that people don't appreciate about AI is it's a platform shift," Prince said. "AI is another platform shift ... the way that you're going to consume information is completely different."
The executive also noted that this change to the web would require the development of new technologies, like sandboxes for AI agents that can be spun up on the fly and then torn down when their task has finished. These could come into play when consumers ask AI agents to perform certain tasks on their behalf, like planning a vacation. "What we're trying to think about is, how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can -- as easily as you open a new tab in your browser -- you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there," Prince said. He imagines there will soon be a time when millions of these "sandboxes" for agents would be created every second. "I think the thing that people don't appreciate about AI is it's a platform shift," Prince said. "AI is another platform shift ... the way that you're going to consume information is completely different."
Terrible Situation (Score:5, Interesting)
So much wasted power.
So much wasted bandwidth.
So much wasted time.
All to generate and repeatedly process the same stuff poorly and inaccurately.
I hate to see it. But, I confess that I'm using the slop myself.
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There is a huge amount of wasted power/bandwidth/time in AI, but the technology will improve: the first cars couldn't drive a mile, and now we have electric vehicles that go hundreds.
Also don't forget that humans "waste" resources too. If an AI makes a programmer even 20% more effective the real question isn't "is AI wasteful?" ... it's "who wastes more: six humans, or five humans and their AIs?"
Cars sucked and were horribly inefficient, but they got better, and reduced waste throughout society by enabling
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but the technology will improve
You say this with no evidence that LLMs can be any better than they are today.
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My evidence is that LLMs work in a way that they don't understand and therefore they don't know how to modify its behaviour. Yes they are doing things with the structure around the LLM, but its capibility is predefined by the algorithm which no one really knows how to modify.
Re: Terrible Situation (Score:2)
The fact that they make mistakes is the reason why they can't be used in place of a lot of jobs. And no matter how much training they have, there is no way to prevent them from making mistakes, that's basically what I mean by no one knowing how to improve them. They will always tell you the best results they find on the Internet which is not good enough to resemble human thinking. In the background it will always be essentially a summary of a Google search with no actual thinking put into it.
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If you want to post anti LLM, take a stance that isn't disproven in a few weeks. Currently we get every few weeks models that are better than before and even when there may be a limit, you're probably disproven in a few weeks or at most month by the next release topping the current one. Today is not yet the peak.
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There are people who get it and prove who don't get it. .I guess you don't.
Re:Terrible Situation (Score:4, Interesting)
So much wasted power.
So much wasted bandwidth.
So much wasted time.
All to generate and repeatedly process the same stuff poorly and inaccurately.
I hate to see it. But, I confess that I'm using the slop myself.
So right. Came into this article to basically say this, but you said it better. What is described in the summary is ridiculously stupid and inefficient and broken as a model, and probably exactly what will happen.
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Probably only in total requests. It's not like bots are streaming Netflix.
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I hate to see it. But, I confess that I'm using the slop myself.
Therefore you don't hate to see it, you're just saying that to try to gin up some sympathy when you are what you are railing against.
HELLO? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Online Bot Traffic Will Exceed Human Traffic By 2027, Cloudflare CEO Says"
WTF?
Bot traffic ALREADY exceeds human traffic by 2 to 1 at the very least.
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Re:HELLO? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure they are downloading videos, as many as possible.
Unless you think they will just leave free training data lying there, or have abandoned their video-generation aspirations.
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I was thinking the same thing.
But if anyone would know, Cloudflare would be the people to know. And they're the ones with vested interest to say that there are more bots rather than less, since they offer services to mitigate impacts of bots.
So this was a very positive statement in my view. I expected it to be much worse than it actually is.
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Yeah, that's what I thought. Maybe not 2:1, but certainly over 50%. There's the normal packets that routers just routinely send to finetune their routing tables, but even besides that, there are bots that generate way more traffic than what humans do
if you really think about it..... (Score:1)
By 2027??? (Score:5, Informative)
"Online Bot Traffic Will Exceed Human Traffic By 2027"
If you consider all kind of bots and search engines, this happened quite a while ago IMHO.
I host many websites, some with considerable real human traffic and my experience is that there is much more traffic that isn't human to the point I need to block some IP, use geo blocking and make custom mod_security rules at the reverse-proxy level to detect non-human traffic in order to not waste too much bandwidth and protect against attack bots and bots scanning for vulnerabilities.
The question is (Score:2)
LOL (Score:3)
Maybe one will have a temper tantrum and generate complaints upstream, complete with accusations and fabricated evidence of the other largest users getting them blocked in order to free up bandwidth. I read somthing like that somewhere.
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email (Score:3)
Meh. AI that AI Shit (Score:4, Interesting)
robots.txt clearly ain't working. Turn their tools against them. Can an AI thingummy spot their usage pattern and block 'em? You are paying for their bandwidth/cpu to rip your content off ? Is there an AI shitheads IP list somewhere to subscribe to?
Redirect their traffic to something that spreads propaganda of your choice. Elvis is alive on the moon. Trump is orange satan. Elon musk eats babies. Marmite is the elixir of the GODS.
Re:Meh. AI that AI Shit (Score:4, Insightful)
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You could have some hidden link that humans won't see and click on, but a scraper would, which would lead it onto a bandwidth-limited site that provides endless procedurally generated content.
Other than that, there are captcha-like blockers that uses Javascript to makes the client prove that it is a real web browser and not a bot: Cloudflare and Anubis are two examples.
Bam. Dead Internet theory no longer a theory (Score:2)
I doubt that is a good thing. It's out of control and I'm pretty sure it's pointless.
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A site called botscout.com used to have graphs of bot vs human activity, and the numbers went up more and more and the graph line got steeper and steeper every month.
Eventually the graph just became a line going straight up, and a few months later they took the graphs offline. I guess there wasn't any point to them any more, eh? It's all fucking bots, all the way down.
We humans are paddling around aimlessly in an ocean of bots, drowning in their traffic.
Machines playing with machines (Score:2)
Not for all of us... (Score:2)
That there is more bot traffic may become true as some (many?) people will use "AI agents" to do things, but also some of us won't be using "AI agents". If enough people say "I don't want to use them" or "they don't work for me", then perhaps it won't be so bad the the concern is over-blown.
Internets value is less and less (Score:4, Interesting)
As the non human traffic increases across the internet, it is becoming to diluted with AI bots. The companies are having to shoulder the burden of all the additional traffic. That means more servers to handle the AI bots.
From a user point of view, it seems the value of what I see is less and less. Kinda like broadcast TV. What I see there is less value to me because of more ads and more junk content. The internet is going the same way.
The 49MB Web Page (Score:2)
This could be ameliorated if websites didn't insist on pushing tons of ads and other junk, which bots just ignore anyway.
For illustration, a blog post: The 49MB Web Page [thatshubham.com] (Hacker News discussion [ycombinator.com])
How (Score:2)
How is this possible? Every time I use many websites I have to click on a crosswalk, bus, car, motorcycle (seriously, that's a scooter, not a motorcycle), put a puzzle piece in the puzzle.... Waited for a page to verify me as human...
Why not a Bluetooth dongle that syncs to my heartbeat and had a wire wrapped around my little finger to prove I'm human. Microsoft couldn't possibly screw that.... Wait nvm
An ongoing arms race (Score:2)
So what? (Score:2)
Why does that matter, as long as all that bot activity is producing things we want?
Isn't that kind of like observing that far more of my computer's processing power goes into building my search index (most of which I will never use) than running my actual search requests?
Could that be used? (Score:2)
I have been thinking if we can use this for anonymity. I am thinking about "VPN over SPAM", "data connection over ads" or "chat over slop" or something like that, where basically bulk waste traffic is slightly modified to contain a small amount of useful data. The bulk traffic would be sent to a vast number of users, so you would never know who the recipient is by looking at the traffic itself.
As yet, I could not come up with a practical solution, but it would make the waste less wasteful.
Are there even that many reputable camera sites? (Score:1)
5,000 sites for buying a digital camera? Why? Is it going to find some incredible deal on one of those that isn't a total scam?
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bot traffic (Score:2)