Technology

Or find a more efficient way to manage data, since their current approach is basically DDOSing the internet for training data and also for responding to user interactions.

see, but they're not competent. further, they don't care. most of these ai companies are snake oil. they're selling you a solution that doesn't meaningfully solve a problem. their main way of surviving is saying "this is what it can do now, just imagine what it can do if you invest money in my company."

they're scammers, the lot of them, running ponzi schemes with our money. if the planet dies for it, that's no concern of theirs. ponzi schemes require the schemer to have no long term plan, just a line of credit that they can keep drawing from until they skip town before the tax collector comes

Perplexity: "But that would cost us moneeyyyy!"

AI crawlers tend to overwhelm websites by doing the least efficient scraping of data possible, basically DDOSing a huge portion of the internet. Perplexity already scraped the net for training data and is now hammering it inefficiently for searches.

Cloudflare is just trying to keep the bots from overwhelming everything.

Cloudflare runs as a CDN/cache/gateway service in front of a ton of websites. Their service is to help protect against DDOS and malicious traffic.

A few weeks ago cloudflare announced they were going to block AI crawling (good, in my opinion). However they also added a paid service that these AI crawlers can use, so it actually becomes a revenue source for them.

This is a response to that from Perplexity who run an AI search company. I don’t actually know how their service works, but they were specifically called out in the announcement and Cloudflare accused them of “stealth scraping” and ignoring robots.txt and other things.

Perplexity (an "AI search engine" company with 500 million in funding) can't bypass cloudflare's anti-bot checks. For each search Perplexity scrapes the top results and summarizes them for the user. Cloudflare intentionally blocks perplexity's scrapers because they ignore robots.txt and mimic real users to get around cloudflare's blocking features. Perplexity argues that their scraping is acceptable because it's user initiated.

Personally I think cloudflare is in the right here. The scraped sites get 0 revenue from Perplexity searches (unless the user decides to go through the sources section and click the links) and Perplexity's scraping is unnecessarily traffic intensive since they don't cache the scraped data.

The anti-AI shield and bot-fight mode are free, you don't need to pay anything to use them.