Future of Internet in the age of AI

Interesting interview with the CEO of Cloudflare on some longer term trends with the web. His "third place" analogy was interesting to me.

We've never really thought of ourselves as a CDN. Starbucks used to talk about sort of the third place -- somewhere that was in between office and home where you did a little bit of work, you did a little bit of socializing, maybe you got a bite to eat. While it is not a perfect analogy, I think at some level, we see the same opportunity for us, to be that third place.

There's going to be a role for edge devices -- for the Apples and Androids and Samsungs of the world. Every driverless car, every ring doorbell will have some amount of AI inference that happens on those devices. But in some cases, they are either going to be too low-powered, or the models are going to be too big.

At the same time, the governments outside the US are saying we're not going to make the same what they view as mistakes that they made with the kind of original rollout of the internet. We're not going to allow it to be something where every piece of our citizens' data gets sent back to the proverbial data center capital of America -- Ashburn, Virginia. All of those things then suggest a need for a third place and that's why we have created what we call a connectivity cloud.

Interesting perspective on a number of things.