AI: Next up, the 'AI Bot Wars'. RTZ #412

Today’s topic brings to mind the ‘Spy vs Spy’ cartoons of Mad Magazine fame from a few decades ago.

As I’ve outlined earlier, the next wave of innovation ahead in this AI Tech Wave is about a firehose of AI bots unleashed to do cool and useful things for millions of mainstream AI users. This coming wave of ‘machine 2 machine’ (m2m) ‘smart agents and AI chatbots’ have both a good and bad side.

As Axios here notes in “The future is all about Bot vs Bot”:

“A new kind of turf war is breaking out on the web, with AI bots battling other AI bots to seize or defend stockpiles of the AI era’s most valuable commodity: data.”

“The big picture: AI makers hungry for more data to train their language models are grabbing everything they can, while information owners are increasingly fighting fire with fire by turning to AI-powered tools to protect their intellectual property.”

“Driving the news: Cloudflare, the infrastructure and security firm used by 1 in 5 websites, introduced a new service Friday that protects clients’ content from poaching by data-harvesting bots.”

• “We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots,” Cloudflare said in a blog post.”

The above AI ‘battle’ of course is about the intensifying race by LLM AI companies to grab and curate as much AI ‘Extractive Data’ as possible to continually Scale their AI models from generation to generation. And it’s resulting in excalating back and forth between content owners and LLM AI companies, a topic I’ve also discussed at length.

The Axios piece discusses this back and forth in detail and is worth reading in full.

More broadly, this notion of ‘Bot vs Bot’, echoing the ‘Spy vs Spy’ analogy I cited above, is something that is just getting started. Not just for content owners and LLM AI companies, but for millions and soon billions of mainstream users fielding AI bots for the widest array of applications and services imaginable. Crossing a lot of ‘Gray Zones’ along the way.

As Axios zooms out to the broader picture:

“Zoom out: The bot versus bot free-for-all over access to web data is just the opening salvo of what will be an increasingly hot war in every realm, as AI fuels new attack strategies and defense tactics.”

• “You can already see it in social media content moderation, where AI-managed rule sets are being applied to identify and manage new floods of AI-generated posts.”

• “The same dynamic is playing itself out in cybersecurity, where malicious hackers are using AI to probe and exploit vulnerabilities while defenders increasingly rely on AI-based pattern detection to flag anomalous behavior.”

  

• “In finance, AI algorithms are already trading against one another, pushing edge-case crises to extremes — and we haven’t even begun to see the longer-term impact of “smart contract”-driven crypto trading.”

• “The future of medicine could pit super-bugs unleashed by AI-empowered biohackers against AI-produced antidotes raced to the field by white-hat biohackers.”

• “Arms-makers and the military are already preparing for robot-filled, drone-drenched battlefields where AI agents call the shots.”

“The bottom line: There’s no escape from this bot vs. bot “technodialectic,” as Andrew Leonard prophetically wrote in a 1996 Wired story.”

• “Leonard’s dictum that bots “cause as many problems as they solve” should be front of mind for every AI CEO today.”

Fortunately, we’ve already seen and figured out how to deal with waves of traditional software ‘Bots vs Bots’ for a few decades now. It’s already been an escalating ‘bot vs bot’ game over AI data despite the set ‘rules of the road’.

This new generation of LLM AI generated bots is the next major wave to come. It too likely will be figured out over time, leaving room for AI ‘m2m’ bots to do more net good for mainstream users at large. ‘Spy vs Spy’, the AI version. 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)