As the AI Tech Wave barrels into our lives, now over a billion+ weekly users strong, there is a narrative growing louder every day, that it’s going to make the old internet a relic of its former self. That it’s going to break the web as we now it. Make existing website businesses less tenable and thus provide less content for the new LLM AI companies to train their models going forward.

Axios summarizes it all well in “AI leaves web in the lurch”:

“The AI-fixated tech industry is rapidly dismantling the old web, with no game plan for how to replace it.”

“State of play: Chatbots have already begun to intercept web traffic and drain publishers' revenue. Now tech giants and startups aim to remodel the devices and browsers we use to access web pages, using AI to summarize or pre-empt the content that people and publishers post online.”

One area of concern are the coming ‘AI Browsers’, a topic I’ve explored at length here, and here:

“Driving the news: Tech circles were abuzz over the past week with news from the normally sedate browser world — the software category that has been shaping access to digital information since the '90s.”

• “Firefox last week debuted an experimental browser tool that provides AI summaries when users hover over links.”

• “Also last week, The Browser Company, maker of the Arc browser that's beloved by some power users, announced it was pivoting to focus on a new AI-powered browser called Dia.”

• “OpenAI has long been rumored to be working on its own browser, but has yet to ship anything.

And of course complaining about the King of today’s Internet, Google, with a little bit of help from Apple:

Especially with its latest Gemini AI and Search centric announcements:

“Over the last two years Google, which customarily casts itself as champion of the open web, has steadily increased the prominence of its AI summaries in every aspect of search.”

• “At Google's I/O developer conference last year it announced the U.S.-wide rollout of the AI summaries, which sit on top of search results and allow users to get their answers without clicking through to source pages (while also sometimes providing made-up facts).”

• “At this year's I/O, the company said that AI Mode, which turns a user's search into an AI chat conversation, would now be a standard feature — although some early reviews have found its information unreliable.”

And others like OpenAI with its plethora of AI Applications. It’s not far behind with new changes for the internet, especially with new AI devices vs our ‘legacy devices’ of accessing the internet like desktop and mobile:

“Meanwhile, OpenAI made headlines with its announcement that it was purchasing Apple designer Jony Ive's AI device startup.”

• “Ive will now spearhead OpenAI's plan to sell new, non-smartphone gadgets that could bring generative AI answers more thoroughly into users' everyday lives.”

• “At Microsoft's recent Build developer conference the company introduced a new open project called NLweb, aimed at letting websites build their own chatbots to help site visitors access content.”

New startups like The Browser Company, Perplexity OpenAI, and others have big designs of redoing the way our core daily software gets things done for us with AI going forward:

“What they're saying: "Increasingly, web pages — apps, articles, and files — will become tool calls with AI chat interfaces," Browser Company CEO Josh Miller wrote to explain why his firm was stopping further work on Arc.”

“Yes, but: As tech goes all in on rebuilding our web experiences with AI, there's no guarantee that the web will still be there when that job is done.”

And AI Agents and other software innovations will acclerate these said changes to come:

And bemoaning their presumed negative impact to come:

• “With chatbots becoming users' default way to find out what's happening in the world, their makers pretend they can plaster this new interface layer over the internet without disrupting the data sources that feed it.”

• “But some media observers believe an AI-first web will choke off the money and attention that motivates web creators to keep extending the common knowledge pool.”

• “Many publishers are already seeing significant traffic and income declines from the shift toward AI search, though Google disputes there's a connection. And creative artists fear their work is being stolen or devalued.”

And recast not as a solution to doing things better for end users, but a plea to save the status quo for today’s middlemen. Note how today’s media cast the new AI companies as a villain, against the internet websites today, the glorified heroes to be protected. Against the phases of AI to come:

“This is everyone's problem. Of course the businesses and people that have built their work around the web are afraid — but AI makers should be worried, too.”

• “The web's vast treasury (and cesspool) of human creative work has accumulated since the 1990s because people wanted to share what they know either for financial or reputational gain, or just to advance a cause or do some good. That setup gave us everything from Wikipedia and YouTube tutorials to blogs and Reddit.”

• “Nearly all of the old-school web has already been fed into AI training databases for regurgitation by bots like ChatGPT. From now on, valuable new contributions are likely to sit behind subscription paywalls or depend on unsteady alternate means of support (membership programs, nonprofit grants, government funding).”

• “If AI undermines the incentives for human beings to update the web with their news, opinions and arguments, it will also cut off its own future.”

The reality of course is that the global internet is just a very efficient marketplace and above all a BUSINESS. All of its constituents have cast themselves into profitable roles in an ecosystem that mostly works.

Of course the core parts of this ecosystem are companies like Google, Meta and others who get the bigger economics. But for the most part the system provides billions of daily users worldwide with useful content, commerce and a whole range of other services up in Box 6 below.

But today’s media and analysts paint it differently in these early days of the AI Tech Wave, to tell a story that monetizes attention under today’s ecosystem.

The story comes as across several popular media narratives.

A popular one is how Google and others embracing AI in Search means less traffic for existing content and website operators, thus less economics, thus less content and commerce directly off said websites. Another is how OpenAI and other LLM AI comnpanies are hoovering up the internet daily for Data to feeds its ever hungry models under ‘Fair Use’, with scant compensation for said hoovering and crawling. And my favorite, how said AI impact on the web with ‘AI Slop’, aka AI generated content augmented by humans, will overwhelm the existing internet/web content, with all its nostalgic glory over the last thirty plus years.

The last one particularly gets me, as I go through desktop and mobile web sites today FULL of ‘pop-up slop’ in an effort to monetize every square millimeter of the article I’m trying to read, with ads and videos interrupting every effort to read the next word in said article. Be it on desktop and mobile.

And this narrative utterly undervalues my daily joy when Google with its Gemini powered AI provides me convenient summaries of a bunch of this ‘pop-up slop’ filled internet content with a readable synapses of my searches and prompts.

Until of course they figure out how to monetize those with a different version of ‘blue link summaries’ down the road. And the internet web sites being worried about today, will inevitably find ways to evolve to new models of success under this AI driven web. After a few cambrian iterations of life and death. With most of 8 billion AI enabled internet/web users being the ultimate beneficiaries. Free and/or paid. Ads and/or subscription supported.

Such is the ‘circle of life’ on the internet, from desktop to mobile and now AI, wobbling its way to reasoning and agentic magic.

We need to embrace it and not over gloss it over with nostalgia mis-remembered of the internet web of old. Especially not under the moniker of ‘Make the internet Great again’. At this early stage of this AI Tech Wave. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)