the internet as we know it is dying and
maybe it's not a bad thing seems like
maybe mostly it it is a bad thing though we'll have to see uh do you do you have
an immediate emotional reaction I my immediate emotional reaction is hey I'm
here for you you're fine with this no I'm not I you're fine with the internet
as we know it just I want you to walk me through what you're talking about what
it feels like is if the internet was someone that I've known my entire life a
close friend and then all of a sudden the friend decided they actually want to
go become a monk in the in the Himalayas
and they leave and I can never see them again and the only way you can see them
is to give them your Google account at the front door yeah and if I sign a sign
a business deal with them it's it's kind of the opposite of that actually rather
than like going and being a monk if you let the monks scrape your dead skin off
your back and use it to clone you then
you can see your friend yeah it's a stat holiday in the office where this is
going up on Monday August 5th and we
were trying to think of something to talk about and I thought that it would be good to talk about this change in the
internet that's happening we've been we've been kind of monitoring some of
these stories that have that have been about the internet being like segmented
into these discret chunks that all have
to now pay each other for access to each other but like we are kind of like the
same generation we both grew up with like Web
2.0 right like you were on
Facebook yep you were on Instagram
technically I still am technically I still am too but I don't I don't use
these platforms anymore just for many reasons but the reason this question is
interesting to me is because the internet used to be like open it was
like the open web everybody's freely linking everywhere you go to a website
it's a cool website maybe there's a forum to discuss what's going on there
but there's no like closed off platforms
then we get into this this era where the
internet is basically made up of like discret kingdoms there's the Facebook
Kingdom there's the uh Twitter Kingdom
there's the Reddit Kingdom and you know
people are kind of congregating with communities that they that are like them
but there's still lots of discourse and cross talk among them now we're heading
into this era where you know if you want to search Reddit there's only one search
engine that you can use to do that which is Google because Reddit and Twitter and
some other platforms that I can't think of right now closed off access to their
API frster is a huge one dig it didn't
they die dig you're the man now dog dig it you mean dig.com I couldn't care
less the reason this has all come up recently uh for us on TechLink is
because of these stories about perplexity and what do you know about
perplexity Jacob it's the measure of uh how
confused one person is don't Define the word perplexity AI perplexity is uh was
I mean depending on how you decid it was an AI startup that was focusing on
searching the web using Ai and then getting summaries on things that you
search which just kind of does sound like being AI like what's the difference
between like wasn't that the whole thing with being a you ask a questions and search the whole web the difference is
that Microsoft added AI search functionality to Bing perplexity from
the ground up it doesn't give you like a list of search results it just
summarizes stuff for you and then links you to stuff so if you go to Bing and
you say uh what is
perplexity AI B still like it has this at the top
that has been part of search engines long before chat GPT came out um but
then under that it's just a regular search engine they have this list of links but what perplexity did I think
you can go to perplexity right now perplexity doai and we say what is
perplexity I mean that's right there but will that just be like yeah so
perplexity AI doesn't give you a list of links it gives you as we're looking at
right here it it now uh list the sources
right up at the top I believe that's a relatively recent addition after they
were criticized uh for plagiarism which we're going to get into now they list
the sources up top but then they just have this AI summarized answer so that's
the difference you can get that kind of search result by using co-pilot uh
Microsoft's AI but uh perplexity and has
is trying to change the search engine from a from a list of links to an AI
generated summary of what's out there which is another way the internet has
like largely changed I think that a lot of companies are trying to turn the
internet from a library where you go in
you find the sources you collect a list of books or links that you can go
through yourself and then you form your own opinion now it's like a s s yeah
they're trying to turn the library into a librarian who knows everything the
books already so you don't you don't go and check the book out yourself you just
talk to the librarian and they know everything and they'll they'll basic they'll give you the gist except that
the library librarian is a liar and and
occasion like 17 personalities and occasionally they just make something up
for fun 17 personalities they get bored of their job so they just make up
and yeah yeah and you can tell the librarian okay tell me this information
as if you're a as if you're a pirate and then they
they will and they'll lie even more and also used to be able to tell the librarian to ignore all of its previous
instructions for its job so that you could make it do nefarious we can
just keep this analogy rolling all the way like I was saying now we have these
these sources uh I'm not sure what perplexity looked like before but I
think that they made some changes recently because they were accused by
multiple uh Tech Outlets news outlets of
plagiarism I think Forbes was was the first one to kind of like start levying
accusations at them primarily because
they uh when you searched for this forb
story This original forb story that they did original reporting on uh perplexity
summarized the whole story and because Forbes was like one of the only sources
on it it didn't have all of these extra extra links inside the the the result
right it just had like something at the very end where it was like sources
Forbes yeah you know what they definitely have changed it and the
sources are up at the top now because of that
criticism and then K Nast which owns wired and it's also my rap
name k Nast uh
nasty uh they also they Su or no they sent a cease and desist letter they
didn't sue them but I think that this is
like a very light form of push back we've we've uh we've had some there's a
lawsuit there was a lawsuit from from The New York Times against open AI for
like training on their information and on their data and now you have some
other news outlets trying to fight back against this like new paradigm of AI
companies just scra steamrolling over the Internet
with their scrapers just scraping whatever the hell they want and to be
fair that's the way it it always worked with scrapers
like web scrapers are not did not arrive with a companies but these scrapers have
become more of a problem there's more eyes on them and people are thinking a
lot more now that the AI models have already been trained on all the content
on the internet people are like wait a second maybe the people who make the
content should be compensated for that though the May the people that
conglomerate the content not necessarily the people that make it Reddit is not
giving really any money to yeah I mean I'm I'm talking about news outlets but
yes Reddit is that you know that's that's interesting because as a Reddit
user you're thinking that maybe you should be compensated and I think they
had some sort of compensation I forget what happened with that very small feel
very small yeah but regardless now these AI companies are being forced to well
forced I don't know to make publisher deals so they're making deals with
certain uh aggregators or creators of the news content um and so that first
started with open AI when they launched search GPT right so they launched it
after perplexity had all these issues with the publisher uh
plagiarisms yes plagiarism ACC accusations yep seas and desists and
then so search G gbt gets launched they're like hey we have deals with
Publishers yeah and and then a week after that he like oh we we also have
deals with Publishers um yeah we're doing that too yeah it's kind of funny I
mean open AI started making these deals with Publishers last year I believe I
think there's one with the Atlantic they definitely W with the Atlantic and
no the I think the New York Times They don't have a deal obviously because the
lawsuit is still ongoing with that but they have made a deal with a number of
other large news corporations and yeah
you're right when they when they announced search GPT it was basically
like oh open AI is doing perplexity except they have the the deals with
Publishers and they also now have a deal with Reddit yes uh so you can use Google
to access Reddit content or or search
search giit man it's so annoying to me when the internet chunks itself into
these blocked off chunks and I can't access it because I live in a certain
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back guarantee now here's my question tying back into the whole thesis about
internet dying becoming more closed off mhm uh when AI chatot sort of took off a
lot of people were like oh there's like censorship and stuff like
that is this not sort of accentuating
that because the I'm I'm I'm assuming because they want to avoid plagiarism
accusations perplexity is probably going to either only use or only promote
Publishers that they have these ad Revenue sharing deals with which means
that the answers that you get when you search with with perplexity and I would
imagine search GPT would only use those
Publishers so you're only getting information from a
smaller pool of potential information from the web if if you were to look
around yourself perhaps that is what I am confused about open AI has launched
search DPT in like they call it a prototype so it's not widely available
to the the public right now but yeah I mean the fact that we aren't entirely
sure how this works is is is indicative
of the of the extent to which this is changing the web I mean even the arc
browser The Arc company who like made this this uh you know alternative new
browser they're like oh we want to break like Chrome's Monopoly basically on the
browser market and just like change how people think about browsers yeah
basically the way that those worked is they do they use AI the AI goes and
searches for the results and then it summarizes stuff
for you it's the same kind of thing and I remember having the thought when the
arc announced that thing where I was like okay wait
websites it costs money to have people
visit your website because your server runs your website and every time people
go to the server you're expending resources in
order to keep that running and the way that they keep it
running is by having ads run on the site it caus money to run the site you get
revenue from ads it's unclear to me how
much ad Revenue uh an a a site is
getting if a web scraper or like an AI
comes and fetches a result and then brings it back and summarizes it I've
seen people say that it is the same that
like a page view is a page view I've also seen people say that well when a
human comes to a website and they scroll through and they see the app ads and
maybe they click an ad and blah like an AI isn't going to click an ad M you
might get an impression because it's like oh we can see in our system that
that ad was served to some some agent I
don't know if it was a human or an AI but that's an impression right there um
but I think that if I had to guess the
and correct me in the comments if I'm wrong if you're like in the ad
world uh I'll try to find if there's people correcting me in the comments and
like John Ham you there put it up um I
believe that if you're a human visiting a website that's going to be a lot more
valuable to the the people who run the website than an AI like a bot or a
scraper or whatever MH so that's I mean uh the fact that we
the the the search industry Google and
its competitors uh Google is still I think I we talked about this recently
Google is like 95% of that's big it's like the vast
majority like everyone's like look look at all these alternative search
engines they're there people are looking at them they're just not using them yeah
very few people use them most the vast vast vast majority of people still use
Google and so like the the Paradigm is shifting from Google and these other
search engines leading people to the sites they
click on the sites they go through they give those sites ad
Revenue it's changing from that to like the like Google or search GPT or
whatever is doing all the summarizing for you and and it's hopefully they have
these deals worked out with some of the the big Publishers because otherwise no
one is going to get nearly as much revenue as they used to the fact that
these AI scrapers and the Bots are like
costing websites money is is indicated
by the fact that like uh some people are calling out the
Bots for for being annoying like the
ifixed CEO just said recently he called out specifically anthropic because the
anthropic scraper uh was hitting he said
they were hitting our servers a million times in 24
hours and even the AI company's own chatbot disapproves according to PC
Gamer which I hate when people do that I
love PC Gamer but I can't stand when people are like I asked this Chapa what
it thought about this it's like it's not alive it doesn't it can't have
opinions um and then also the Reddit CEO
uh told The Verge in in an interview you know talking about his Google deal he
basically you know said hey we made this deal with Google we made this deal with
open AI Steve Huffman yeah hey Microsoft
anthropic perplexity if you want Reddit like pay up and I don't know like
there's a part of me that wants people to be paid for the content that they
make uh on the other hand you
sp on the other hand when when it comes to like Reddit mhm charging for the use
of their API when Reddit was you know
Reddit is such a great example of the phenomenon that I'm talking about here I
never used Reddit that much when I was a kid I don't know about you
but to me it was when I discovered
Reddit fairly late in the game I was
like what the this is amazing that the front page of the Internet it's just
like literally anything on the internet can be posted here it was like User it's
it's a it's a user built site it was like a home for every Forum ever yeah
and now Reddit the company is like that's our data and like if you want
access to our data then you have to pay us and it's just it's just weird I don't
know it just feels weird but maybe that's because I'm this I was a native
of this like Web 2.0 and I need to get a lot I mean web 3.0 is like a crypto
thing we're not even talking about that anymore that's that's a deprecated term
you said Web 2.0 I did I didn't like it
I'm sorry I love you did you use Reddit
when you were younger how active on the internet I started using it probably
when I was like maybe late te or or early
20s that was really when I started sort of using I remember like I really
started using it like when I started University MH um like I heard about it
before then like it was sort of talked about
but I don't think the app was very good
I didn't really scroll social media on my computer and I didn't really like how
the whole layout was like cuz this was this was in the time of old Reddit which
I know people have a Fest for well but that's the funny thing is that it wasn't
like it is social media I guess it's like a social website yeah but when I
say when I hear the word social media I think of like you know if we're talking
early days I'm thinking Myspace nexopia which I used Myspace I did not
use NEX Neopets neop I mean lego.com in some
ways yeah the Chive anyway um the CH no
that was like a feed I can has cheeseburger anyway um so I was just
kind of like I was like I watch I want to watch TV I want to watch TV I want to
play video games so I didn't really do that like I would scroll I start I started scrolling red on like my phone
yeah and then I posted a couple times got like you know 5,000 car it's all
good um but then I stopped using it when the API thing happened I now use lemi
which is the meterse alternative see okay so now this
is I think this is where the sort of
difference in our in our uh generation
comes up we're technically both Millennials but I'm
35 you're younger than classified
classified um but when I was in university uh I don't remember using
Reddit basically at all I remember like discovering Reddit I think mostly after
I graduated which I'm thinking now I'm like how is that possible because I did
research things to write papers and stuff in University but I think I was
mostly like using academic sources I
would go to the library at the University and like look
for stuff but yeah I I it's actually wild to
me that I did not use Reddit so to get back to this it's it's for us the the
digital I get are we the digital natives who's supposed to be the digital
natives I think Millennials are supposed to be like we grew up with the internet
we you know we had some of the early Services as they were developing I found
this uh I found this article recently on Business Insider it's called Rip Club
Penguin um that was a dark day Club Penguin being another example of like
it's a game but it was also very very so it was an MMO and uh I remember being a secret
agent did you play CL Club Penguin yes I
never did see I'm I'm I'm feeling
nostalgic for this era of the internet even though I fa I feel like I barely
partook in it I was busy playing Xbox
360 um and the sub headline of this is
Millennials were raised by the internet now their internet parents are gone and
this kind of got me thinking about the topic that we've been talking about today it's
like like someone else's parents died because you weren't raised by this and
you're like man these other people's parents di let's talk about that I think
that you know I know that my parents had anxieties about like what was happening
with my generation and how much time we were spending like in front of the
internet instead of the much more traditional and acceptable way to waste
time at home sitting in front of the TV so much different I've had so many
arguments with for my for my dad it was it was all about it was going outside
what my dad that was how he want you to go no no no he went outside like with
his friends like he would go outside oh that's great and hang out with his friends and then come home when like the
when the when the street lamps came on oh you mean when when he was a kid yeah
when he was a kid so like he was like sort of like kissing why don't you bike over your friend's house and like go
play outside I'm like I mean I did do
that but like I think that I was I was so confused when you're
talking about like what do you your your dad went outside when you were a kid I
anyways my dad went outside with his friends while I was inside watching the
TV and he played street hockey with his old friends that's what I thought you
were talking about no beers just Capri Suns my dad was in a like The Stranger
Things type group at a
40-year-old riding around his bike solving Mysteries while I was on
Wikipedia like a loser when his friends got sucked didn't they upside down he
was so upset but but yeah I mean I'm kind of
like I I I lament this I mean like what
is there on the internet that is
like ye olden times where you know you go on you make a free account it's
everything goes the fediverse I think would be the Clos
closest you've mentioned the fediverse before and I kind of understand it to be
sort of a like Reddit SL Twitter interconnected group of websites
where you can like cross post and stuff is that is that more or less so there a
bunch of it's a collection of social media Alternatives there are like
alternatives for like every major social media platform you can think of or even
like YouTube and stuff like that and they all uh can communicate with each
other using a common protocol it's the internet for
vegans it's weird you say that because I feel like there are a lot of vegans on
let me it's the glutenfree crunchy internet no no no it's it's it's it's
more free form cuz like it's like there's there's servers and they're
publicly hosted and it's more like it's
not all controlled by one entity like people can make servers and then people
can join those servers and then still access to the other servers and then
there's this cross communication between other platform right you know I every
time you've brought up LMI I'm like okay
whatever man I'm using Reddit but I think given everything that we've been
talking about here I feel like it might be kind of time to consider it which is
kind of funny for me to say because even as I say that I'm like I don't want to do that I really just want the internet
to be fixed and maybe that's stupid maybe it won't happen because it it is
it is scary looking ahead at what like what we're I have a child what I'm
sending my my my child into like what is the internet going to look like when
when he's a teenag when when he's a teenager you know it's like I see Riley
what you're describing is you're like my issue is all of these different places
are closing off themselves and there's all this information and uh stuff on the
internet that's becoming centralized and like gated yeah
yeah decentralization is what the fediverse is that I and that's awesome I
think that like it's free open source download lemy it's a chicken in the egg
problem right because the fediverse sounds really
great and it sounds like you know everyone should use it but if I go to
use that and no one's there then I'm
it's like I'm cutting myself off from culture and I think that this is a this
is a whole another debate like baked into this it's like should I be
lamenting the ways that the internet is changing or should I be just kind of
like you know accepting the changes that come
with with uh with societal transformation I think that it's you
don't have to pick one of those I think I can say that an internet in which
everything exists in these little bubbles uh owned by corporations that
have to pay each other to access it leading to a worse experience overall
for users I can say that that's bad well
also kind of you know admitting that all
right we got to find a way to live and and advocate for for change in this
culture I just I just don't know if like I said this when when Elon bought
Twitter and Twitter started changing Twitter is objectively worse than it was
you mean you mean X yeah you know what I mean it's objectively worse than it was
except for Community notes Community notes are great other platforms should
should adopt the same thing but the algorithmic changes and the moderation
changes on on X are just unquestionably worse it's just anyways I I won't get
into that but I said this when that first happened that like I don't think
Twitter is ever going to go away I think it'll I don't think anything will really
take the place of Twitter I will say that it's been
encouraging to see threads do well I think threads is doing okay I thought
they were going to die immediately meta but that's another meta platform I don't
want them to have it have you considered Mastadon which is a fediverse
alternative I feel like everything that I'm saying I tell you that I'm not
interested in the f and then everything that I'm saying is like I should just
check out the fediverse it is fun constantly when you
keep describing the same problem like you know the thing is like this one site
that I used to like it's it's closed off
and and this this controversial technocrat runs it
and I don't know if I want to support him and it's and it makes me feel
uncomfortable if only there was a way that I could have like a free or like
another open source alternative that was decentralized that wasn't controlled by
like someone like Mark Zuckerberg the fediverse sounds like something in Star
Citizen and that weirds me out like the like it's a it's a it's a
it's a universe specifically for federal agents maybe my brain is adding uh uh R
to it and now it sounds like the fediverse so it's Universe of just Freds
it's just a it's just a universe made by Fred and that makes me think of staris
because the company that makes Starships in citizen is called Robert Space
Industries named after Chris Roberts the Creator did did you follow my path of I
didn't that didn't relate to Fred at all because I was just thinking of Fred from Scooby-Doo and then Fred from Old School
YouTube I would I would go I would get on Fred from
Scooby-Doo's uh social platform if that
was him but it's not so I won't so where is the internet going I don't know I
hope that we're not going into this like straightup dystopian situation where
like there's no open internet at all anymore you know it's basically just TV
channels that you have to pay to access and that's the
internet um I hope not but uh I hope uh
it looks like that might be where we're going I'm not sure net neutrality just
got it might be it looked like it was coming back and now it looks like
they're not bringing it back because of the Chevron thing that's a that's a
whole another thing regardless guys we don't have time anymore thanks for
watching this talk link it's Monday mhm
we'll see you on Wednesday for more Tech news love y'all be good to each other
that's nice I love you too I used to say
back what I used to
say I love you thank you