Chris Dixon: preference

Transcript context

…How will AI change how the web is organized? Will it just be totally different in five years? That’s a great question. A couple of things I’ll say on that, and all of this, obviously, in the context of our firm does a lot of AI investing. I think it’s generally a great thing. The technology is amazing and impressive, and every day you see new amazing things. There’re debates around whether it’s going to slow down. My guess is it’s not going to slow down. There’re so many smart people and so much money and so many different ways in which it can improve. It was pre-training, and now it looks like it’s reasoning. They’ll probably come up with some other method in a year that does that. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface around humanoid robots and haven’t gone deep on video and other forms of media modalities. One thing I think a lot about, though, is the economics of the internet. Specifically, I have a chapter in the book on this. I think of the internet as having an implicit covenant right now. So you have these five to ten companies — Facebook, Google, Amazon, et cetera — who control 90 percent plus of the traffic and the money. Just to take Google as an example . . . Then there’s the rest of the internet, the long tail of the internet. There’s my blog, your blog, a cooking site, a travel site, whatever it might be. For 25 years or so, there’s been this implicit covenant between the distribution centers like Google and the content providers like us. That covenant is, “Hey, you let us fair use, you let us take a snippet of your content, index it, put it in our search results or let people share it on my social network or whatever it might be. The trade is, we’ll put a link there, and you’ll get some traffic back, and then you can have ads or subscriptions or make it free or whatever you choose to do.” That’s been the equilibrium state that evolved. It wasn’t as if people sat down and decided that, but it evolved into that, and it’s worked reasonably well. I think it’s worked more to the favor of the distribution side, to the Googles of the world. We see that in Rupert Murdoch and Fox sued Google over it a bunch. I think Facebook just removed news in Canada because they’re upset about it. It’s not that happy, but it sort of worked. What happens in a world where you just get the answer and there’s no need for a link? Which is the world we’re in now. I don’t know about you, but I’m probably using Claude and ChatGPT and all these things more than I’m using Google. I read fewer books also. It’s not just media sites. Why read a book when you can ask for a 10-page printed report on the history of Edward III?…

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