Internet before a major turning point
The balance of operations on the internet may soon change dramatically as artificial intelligence (AI) bots increasingly dominate.
Mr. Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare (an American technology company specializing in providing internet infrastructure), predicts that the traffic created by AI may surpass humans by 2027.
Speaking at the SXSW event in Austin (USA), Mr. Prince said that the explosion of generative artificial intelligence is the main driving force driving this trend.
As AI tools become increasingly popular, they are undertaking many tasks that are inherently performed by humans, from searching for information to online shopping.
Bots operate differently from humans
According to Mr. Prince, the big difference lies in the way bots use the internet. An ordinary user can access several websites to find information, while an AI system can scan thousands of pages in just a few seconds.
For example, if a person buys a camera and visits about 5 websites, an AI assistant can access up to 5,000 pages to synthesize results. This creates a huge amount of data load that network systems have to process.
Previously, bots only accounted for about 20% of internet traffic, mainly from search engines or a small part of unwanted activity. However, with the unlimited data demand of generative AI, this number is increasing rapidly.
Infrastructure pressure and new internet model
The increase in traffic from bots forces companies to redesign the internet infrastructure. One of the new ideas is to create temporary testing environments specifically for AI agents.
These environments can be launched instantly to handle tasks, and then disappear after completion.
Mr. Prince predicts that in the future, millions of such environments could be created every second. This means a huge demand for data centers, servers and processing capabilities.
This trend is compared to the pandemic period, when the demand for watching videos on YouTube or Netflix put great pressure on the network infrastructure.
However, unlike that period, AI traffic is forecast to increase continuously, with no signs of slowing down.
Changing the way people access information
For companies like Cloudflare, this trend is both a challenge and an opportunity. Businesses must develop traffic management tools and prevent malicious bots.
More importantly, according to Mr. Prince, AI is not just a new technology but a fundamental change. The way people search, receive and process information on the internet will be completely different in the near future.
