(Preview) The Post-AI Internet Realities, How Future Creators Can Succeed, Mail on Startups, F1 Rights, and Alternative Rock

The pay-per-crawl model for compensating content creators on the Internet, what sorts of content might win if that market actually materializes, and the grim outlook for today's digital publishers. From there: Thoughts on the cost structures that can succeed, the value of community and direct connections to customers, and Stephen Colbert's exit at CBS. At the end: Questions on big tech's hiring power, contractors at startups, Chinese AI development, F1 broadcast rights, alternative rock, and what to do in Taipei and DC.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

• 0:08Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing?

• 0:20Ben Thompson?

  Doing okay, Andrew, doing okay. It's I'm here back in Taiwan, um, addressing some things, taking care of some things as it were. It's summer, it's very hot. I'm reminded why I'm usually not here in the summer. But other than that, I'm all good.

• 0:35Andrew Sharp?

  There you go. Well, it's good. I'm in a good mood. I it's summer here as well. I'm still in New England. I'm on Nantucket. I've been in the sun all day, so I might get a little punchy on this one. But with a week between shows, I'm always very excited to see you on the other line here. So we'll dive into it.

• 0:55Ben Thompson?

  In contrast, in contrast to twice a week, when you're just getting pretty sick of me.

• 0:58Andrew Sharp?

  Exactly. It's a real grind seeing you every 72 hours. Oh, my God, I don't know how I do it all year long, but a good

• 1:07Ben Thompson?

  That's what the money's for, as Don Draper would say.

• 1:09Andrew Sharp?

  Midsummer rundown. That is what the money's for. We're going to be bouncing all over the place. However, we will begin with some responses to your article on Monday. The title was content and community, and you were riffing on the implications of what we discussed at the end of last week's show, which was Cloudflare's plan to block AI crawlers on Cloudflare-protected websites on one hand, and then on the other hand, Cloudflare will give AI companies and Cloudflare websites the opportunity to use a pay-per-crawl system, which would collect a fee from AI companies every time they crawl a website and then pay most of that money to the website owner.

• 1:55Andrew Sharp?

  So regarding that idea and a new framework for the post-AI internet, Finn wrote in and said, salutations.

• 2:05Andrew Sharp?

  Cloudflare's push to have AI providers pay for content crawls makes no sense. None. A second Negroni makes me feel generous, so I'll share with you why that is. First, we can factor out the use case of trainings, as that is a single request to pull a piece of content once, and that's that. Maybe they put in another request in six months for Llama 3.3-500b_26-04. Crawls during inference, he continues, are not a real business case. Why would Anthropic pay $100 million for crawling the same sources for different users

• 2:50Andrew Sharp?

  over and over again if they can pay $100,000 for hard drives and proxy their MCP browser's HTTP connection through a Redis cache and crawl pages at some...

• 3:06Ben Thompson?

  Redis cache.

• 3:07Andrew Sharp?

  I was completely underwater with that entire sentence. A Redis cache and crawl pages at some cost-efficient minima. Ben posts on a schedule. I know when he'll post. Congrats, Ben. You made four cents last week. Given the size of the holes in your analysis here, maybe that's fair. Oh, boy. Cloudflare's marketing speak and some motivated reasoning had you confuse a local optima with a default. So, Ben, Finn is bringing the heat. What do you have to say for yourself? What do you think?

• 3:43Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, Finn needs a few more Negronis because he needs to relax.

• 3:47Andrew Sharp?

  Take it down a notch.

• 3:49Ben Thompson?

  My initial response here. So, zooming out, a challenge about writing about this particular topic. And remember, this goes back to me writing about the Agentic web and, you know, why ads were great for the human web and we're going to need something different as we go to AI. All that, and the problem with writing that article is it's all very sort of theoretical, pie in the sky. There's a huge, how do we... Get from here to there sort of aspect to it. And it's really wide on details, which I sort of admitted at the time, but it also does make me hesitant to even write about this stuff because you get Finn with a Negroni coming along saying bad, bad, bad, bad, picking apart all the details, X, Y, Z.

• 4:33Andrew Sharp?

  Can I also just add for the sake of the listeners who are hearing the email and not reading the email? I do need to note for the record, the entire email was written in Sam Altman house style, all lowercase letters. So we have to deduct about 50 points from the grade right off the top. But again, I do appreciate the energy from Finn there.

• 4:54Ben Thompson?

  No, I mean, in Finn's defense, I agree. Like, like this overall structure of the Cloudflare proposal is not going to scale, is not going to get somewhere. So when I speak, when I, just to go back to the, the point before, when I talk about it, it's more about the like, this is directionally, there's something here. And by the way, to get there, you're going to need someone exerting power to make it happen. That's sort of my, my, my broader overall take on, on the Cloudflare piece. Now, the reality is, and this is the problem with the internet in general, you can go back to regular websites versus Google.

• 5:37Ben Thompson?

  Google needs the web, but not any one website.

• 5:42Andrew Sharp?

  Right.

• 5:43Ben Thompson?

  Any one website, they all need Google. So you have this real sort of mismatch in power and need. And it, this applies to the copyright cases. The problem with all these plaintiffs bringing the case about the AI models and the judges, both judges had to sort of admit this, including Judge Chabria, who wanted to rule for the plaintiffs. It's like, they need a lot of content, they don't necessarily need your content. So like, what's the actual case that, that, that you have here? And that's just a reality sort of writ large. So overcoming that by saying, oh, I'm gonna like, you know, anyone, the interest of any one publisher, you can't. Rely on this system.

• 6:27Ben Thompson?

  And I think a problem with Cloudflare's proposal is the fact it's sort of geared to existing systems.

• 6:34Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 6:35Ben Thompson?

  Now broadly speaking, are we going to need content generation for AI? I think so. I don't think that, that I think if AI, if they're just gonna pay for content generators all along, I don't think that's gonna scale sufficiently. You like, like, maybe it will, maybe the argument is that you actually don't need that many facts and you, you like, and that's gonna be sufficient. And, and by the way, that might be true. Like, I might be wrong. They might have gotten enough to be sufficiently smart and now they just need like, one wire service to.

• 7:04Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, well, well, just one wire service to keep them updated on current events and they can sort of rely on that. But if you do think that they need significantly more content, I think the answer is some, it needs to be some sort of market for content and that, that spurs people to come in and fill that need. However, and this was the part I was getting at in the article, and I think we talked about it on this podcast, that's why I brought up the Facebook analogy.

• 7:34Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 7:35Ben Thompson?

  What makes these, the true advertising businesses, which is really three, I would say. That's Google, Facebook and Amazon. And actually, Amazon's maybe the best example here. Amazon has built a multi-billion dollar advertising business. And all the advertisers are sellers on Amazon and they literally advertise on amazon.com. It's completely self-contained. These entities create their own markets. They create their own customers. This is why Meta is impervious to a CPG boycott that they tried to, you know, that in like 2020, because all the meta advertisers that matter are entities that only exist because of Meta.

• 8:17Ben Thompson?

  That's why when like COVID first struck, like Meta's revenue barely got hit at all. Whereas everyone just said, oh, recession's coming, all advertisers get pulled. If you're an entity that exists because of Facebook and all your business is based on performance marketing, where you pay a price to acquire a customer, you literally need to advertise or die. You know, you're going to die, right?

• 8:41Andrew Sharp?

  And the point is that they pulled these new business models into existence. These aren't like

• 8:47Ben Thompson?

  That's right.

• 8:48Andrew Sharp?

  Unilevers or the legacy brands that have dominated advertising in the past.

• 8:53Ben Thompson?

  Now, Google is kind of unique. Google's kind of unique because Google sort of, the whole market was there waiting for Google, which was this open web disparate, can't find anything, too much stuff. Google comes in and just sort of captures it. And that's part of why Google's such a dysfunctional company because their whole life has been easy. They've played on easy mode. They created a brilliant products and they've just been harvesting ever since. Which by the way, Google's business model is kind of harvesting, right? I'm this, I've talked about on here, like the, I compare it to Uber and Airbnb. Right? Where Airbnb somehow got all this amazing press for years and years and everyone dumped on Uber.

• 9:33Ben Thompson?

  And it was always confusing to me because I feel the externalities of Uber are very positive. Like drunk drivers out the road, more common people getting around, like all the, like you're just expanding transportation. Whereas Airbnb, it's like, does anyone actually want an Airbnb next door to them? Like, like the, the, the externalities are, are I think much more negative than an Uber. And I think there's a similar thing when it comes to advertising. Google somehow gets a, doesn't get all the opprobrium that Facebook does. Despite the fact, a huge amount of Google revenue is scavenging off of like links that would have been clicked anyway. Like, like when you search for something and you click the sponsored link and the real link is right below it. What service did Google provide?

• 10:17Ben Thompson?

  Or if you can search for a particular product.

• 10:19Andrew Sharp?

  criticism of Amazon and its massive ad business.

• 10:22Ben Thompson?

  All search engine advertising is kind of a little suspect. Like, like, like there's, there is value, but by and large, it's so easy because he's just telling you what they want. That it's kind of just like a tax in many respects. Whereas the reason I've always defended Facebook's advertising, it's actually introducing you to new products that you didn't know existed. Which I think is, is a much more positive manifestation of advertising and, and why it's a good thing. So, yeah, that's, we're sort of sidetracked here from the point, but.

• 10:54Andrew Sharp?

  You did, as is your want, but before you take it full circle and go back to pay per crawl, I just want to say that reading your article on Monday was gratifying because on the last show when we. We were discussing this. I was pretty bearish on the idea that pay per crawl was a model that could somehow revive the economics of the open internet and ad supported websites, which is some of the language that was being used by Matthew Prince in the blog post announcing this. It was like, we're the saviors. This is a life preserver for people who are being left behind by the AI internet.

• 11:30Andrew Sharp?

  And I, the reason I was bearish is I think it's worth being clear about some of the headwinds that those folks are facing. The legacy internet, Google is sending less traffic than ever to external websites. So the distribution mechanism is dying. The ad model has been dying for 15 years at this point. It's in worse shape than ever at this point. That's also compounded by diminished audience for all these websites.

• 12:00Andrew Sharp?

  And then compounding things again is the idea that in the future, LLMs will be the portal to the internet for most people and most people won't visit websites at all, which is already sort of happening. So I don't know how futuristic that take actually is. And then the main thing on top of all that, with respect to media companies, the cost structure just doesn't make sense. And like the cost structure of good ambitious media companies that do the sort of work that people want to support and want to preserve in the years to come.

• 12:37Andrew Sharp?

  It just hasn't really made sense for a long time. And so it would be awesome if the AI licensing market is big enough to solve all those problems and make it 1997 again for some of these people. But I'm not going to hold my breath on that becoming any sort of reality anytime soon.

• 12:55Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, I don't think it's going to happen at all. Like the reality is, is if you make this market for AI generated content, who's the people are going to actually win this market. And this is sort of the full circle point.

• 13:05Andrew Sharp?

  Exactly.

• 13:06Ben Thompson?

  Are going, I think, to be new entities that are created specifically because this, this market was created.

• 13:12Andrew Sharp?

  And so what you wrote on Monday where I was like, aha. Now I see why Ben was taking a wait and see approach with what might be possible for this sort of framework over the next 10 or 15 years in terms of like yielding success.

• 13:24Ben Thompson?

  I think the analogy I would use is um is ghost kitchens for content, right? So the ghost kitchen is this idea of DoorDash and Uber Eats has sort of created this new market for food delivery. Now, most of the sort of suppliers in that are existing restaurants, which makes sense. They say, oh, a new revenue stream, we can add this on, blah, blah, blah. Let's ignore how this has destroyed the service level within the actual restaurant and all those sorts of things that that you and I as old fogies sort of like complain about.

• 13:53Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Ben Thompson?

  But there's also like a new opportunity, which is you create virtual restaurants and literally you're completely structured around food delivery. It's a like, it's a store that doesn't exist in the real world. It only exists in the apps and then your cost structure is optimized for it and your workflows, all those sorts of things. And actually, there's many respects where the virtual restaurants are actually much better food because the food's like structured for delivery. It assumes it's going to be 30 minutes until it's actually consumed, like all, like all those sort of bits and pieces. And I could see like virtual, you know, ghost kitchens for content. Like the, if there's an incentive structure created to generate content, there's some sort of market for it.

• 14:35Ben Thompson?

  I think that is what would actually win and it's, it'll be entities that exist only because this market structure was created. Just like meta advertisers only exist because meta advertising exists. Like I, I think there's, there's a Google, again, Google's kind of the exception. They captured the web, the web was just sitting there waiting to be captured. But the, the, the more normal state of affairs is these entities create their own suppliers. And like Apple created their own app suppliers, like by the virtue of the apps were existing. Did existing app developers?

• 15:14Ben Thompson?

  Go to the iPhone? Yes, but that's a very small portion. A huge majority it came in to fill the market. And there's an eternal like chicken and egg question about what comes first? I thought about this a lot. I've written about this a lot in the context of app stores. When I was at Microsoft, working on the Windows 8 app stores, something sort of you thought a lot about. What comes first? Do you get developers first? Or do you get the market? It's absolutely the market comes first. That you, you, Apple dominates the app store because they created the phone that people wanted. People were there and then they created the mechanism for developers to come in and to serve that market. That is absolutely the, the direction in which that happens.

• 15:58Ben Thompson?

  And I think that is a principle that extends broadly.

• 16:01Andrew Sharp?

  Okay, well, one question before we shift to the future of content makers. And first of all, we should note that like this vision for the future is a lot less rosier than the content Independence Day language and our, our.

• 16:17Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, to be clear, like I'm with Finn. Like, like I, I, you know, Finn was being a little, uh, what's a little lubricious or whatever? What's the word when you're talking a lot of smack when you're.

• 16:25Andrew Sharp?

  Dickish? Um.

• 16:27Ben Thompson?

  No, no, no, no. No, I mean, a nice word.

• 16:30Andrew Sharp?

  But amusingly dickish, I appreciate it.

• 16:32Ben Thompson?

  I don't see, I don't see the quad flair mechanism really going anywhere. To the extent it does, it's almost more like brand marketing. It's like the big guys could sign up for this deal. You know, like the New York Times of the world or whatever it might be. But those are also the folks that kind of need the least help.

• 16:48Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:49Ben Thompson?

  Is this gonna save your?

• 16:51Andrew Sharp?

  Is, is people who are basically coming to this market to write exclusively, not necessarily exclusively, but primarily for AI crawlers.

• 17:00Ben Thompson?

  Oh, I think exclusively, like why go through the trouble of having a website and all those sort of things? Like literally just create content for, and, and yeah, and these are not like going to be amazing jobs or, or a great job. Like there's a reason why like the scaly eyes of the world are outsourcing labor to like the Philippines or whatever it might be, right? Like that, that, let's be clear about what sort of the reality here is here. It's a. The barbell effect comes for everyone. There's the sort of like one side prestige and they have direct consumers that go to them directly. And on the other side is like the mines, the salt mines of content and, and you're getting paid. It's not amazing work. It's not, you know, it's, it's a commodity. It's a total commodity.

• 17:41Ben Thompson?

  That's the thing, like the L L Ms, they don't even want content. They want tokens. They want like the, the, like it's, it's total commodit- commodification.

• 17:52Andrew Sharp?

  So lowercase Finn here, he was voicing skepticism that was shared by a few other listeners who were wondering.

• 18:00Ben Thompson?

  Which is totally reasonable, just to be clear.

• 18:02Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, but like in terms of how big this market could be, um, because how many times would AI models actually crawl? If they had to pay, like, couldn't they just index a page?

• 18:14Ben Thompson?

  That's what they do index. They, they build indexes. Yeah. I mean, the, the, um, so yeah, all, all that is, is correct. Like I don't see this as ever being any some sort of meaningful revenue stream. I'm not, I'm not going to turn on the cloud for, I don't use cloud for, but I would not turn on anyway. I think this is sort of a doomed, um, the idea that this is going to save existing publishers, existing publishing business models. I think that's, I, I just don't think that's.

• 18:40Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah. I think that's fair. Okay. Um, well, to keep it moving, Paul says, speaking of publishers. Hey guys, I really enjoyed your conversation about cloud flare last episode and I wanted to run an idea by you. Do you think the current online publishing transition from Google search to AI free for all? And now potentially to pay per crawl is comparable to the music industry's transition in the 2000s? They went from CDs to pirated music to streaming. And today's music industry is much less lucrative than it was in the days of CDs. So do online publishers just need to accept this new reality? And start figuring out their equivalent of an era's tour in order to make money for themselves?

• 19:25Andrew Sharp?

  Ben, what do you think?

• 19:28Ben Thompson?

  I think it is sort of an interesting analogy. To be clear, the era's tour is a singular sort of thing. That's for Taylor Swift. Like, no, but I think it's an important distinction. You can't look at this as a whole. There's going to be this massive bifurcation. So, the New York Times is like the Taylor Swift in this analogy, where super successful publishing model. I wrote years ago, we can't always use the New York Times as our stand-in for publishing because they're exceptional. They've, they've actually figured out the internet in a way that the, if anything, they've actually harmed all the other publishers. They scarf up all the best talent. They, like, everyone who has a subscription just subscribes to New York Times instead of subscribing to someone else.

• 20:08Ben Thompson?

  So, like, everyone's competing to be, like, people's second subscription. And that's not a very, like, good place to be.

• 20:16Andrew Sharp?

  And also, we should be clear and explicit. They solved their problems with subscriptions and not advertising. And it took other publications longer to get there and longer to see the light there.

• 20:28Ben Thompson?

  And a fully integrated approach, which is like, our editorial mission is going to be defined by being worth a subscription. Like, this goes back to, like, there was very explicit memos. I, I wrote about this, I think I did at the time. They did this sort of exposé on the working conditions at Amazon. And not just the warehouse workers, but those poor office workers. Their work's so hard, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, like, there, it was very sort of controversial. People in tech were upset about it. I sort of defended the New York Times. I'm like, well, number one, it does kind of suck to work at Amazon.

• 20:57Andrew Sharp?

  I was gonna say, from what I've heard, that's not wrong.

• 21:00Ben Thompson?

  I mean, it sucks so bad to work at Amazon that it sort of single-handedly saved Microsoft. Because Microsoft was up there in Seattle, not doing very well. But no one wanted to move. Like, if they were so competitive, Microsoft would have lost. Right. Microsoft would have lost all their talent. If you're up in Seattle, it's like, do you want to work for Amazon? Okay, guess I'll soldier on, on Office, or Windows, or sort of whatever it might be. That was just why all the tech companies had open offices in, you know, in Seattle. Because like, oh, there's actually a huge opportunity here. But they didn't really do that until like the 2010, 2011 era, around when Microsoft sort of started to get their crap together. There was like this huge opportunity to take all Microsoft's talent in the 2000s

• 21:41Ben Thompson?

  that never really materialized because it sucks so bad to work at Amazon. And everyone in Seattle knew that. Right. And so, it, it, it sort of saved Microsoft. But, uh, but then also my other point was like, look, you're the tech industry, you're the most important industry in the world. You're going to get... Critiques like this.

• 21:59Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Ben Thompson?

  And internal New York Times like this is amazing. We like we people really like this. This is the stuff people will pay for. We needed to do less day to day stuff and more in depth things like this that prompt people to pay to feel good about paying. So it was a and and again, setting aside your view of the New York Times and your personal opinion about their politics from a business perspective, it's it's exactly what I've been calling for. You have to have a whole holistic strategy that combine your business model and your editorial need to work hand in hand. This whole idea of like the firewall between business and that was a vestige of being a geographic monopoly.

• 22:44Ben Thompson?

  You actually it turned out you got that for free. That wasn't the key to you being successful. And going forward, once that was gone, once you had to compete, your whole business needs to be aligned in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. The New York Times did that. They did that sooner than everyone else and they've won like like and so.

• 23:02Andrew Sharp?

  And early to bundling as well.

• 23:04Ben Thompson?

  Right. So again, setting aside the partisan political component, which a lot of our audience, I'm sure is annoyed at the New York Times from a business analytical perspective, it's very impressive. It's like what they've done over the last sort of 10 to 15 years. So anyhow, but they're the exception. Everyone else is like, it's been bad. It's been getting worse and now AI is just accelerating what was our AI is not killing them. AI is accelerating the death that was sort of occurring. Maybe it's a mercy killing to a certain extent.

• 23:33Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 23:33Ben Thompson?

  And so.

• 23:34Andrew Sharp?

  And to put a finer point on that, I mean, even the Washington Post has been struggling in the past couple of years. And so it like if the Post is struggling, you can imagine what mid sized institutions are dealing with in the modern.

• 23:46Ben Thompson?

  Oh, yeah. And you go to their webpages and they're horrific. Like there's ads that like, like if you I've talked about, I had to do a 180 on the whole ad blocker thing where I was very sort of principled about it. Like, look, if you're going there, you have to pay the price. You literally can't surf the pages like these videos. There's these videos that just take over the screen. It's unbelievable. It's like, it's like, how is this? How is this going to like be sustainable? It's not.

• 24:10Andrew Sharp?

  And it hasn't been.

• 24:10Ben Thompson?

  Scratching out every penny.

• 24:11Andrew Sharp?

  Spoiler alert. Yeah. Well, and look, so the reason I like this email and the reason I like this analogy, the era's tour is something of a red herring. I believe it made over a billion dollars a couple of years ago when Taylor Swift was touring the country and then the world. But the idea of making your money in music through live shows has proven fairly successful for a larger cohort than just Taylor Swift. And it gets at some of what you were writing about with the second half of Monday's article in terms of an actual optimistic future for people who are publishing on the internet. Does that resonate with you?

• 24:51Ben Thompson?

  It's funny. It does. Well, it's funny because I was, I was going to make another point.

• 24:57Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 24:57Ben Thompson?

  Where I think the music industry and Spotify is interesting. I think one of the big questions is how do you price content? Like for this whole paper crawl thing or whatever, right? Like it, that's part of the whole problem. It's not, there's like, how do you actually create some sort of market here? I could see in the long run, if there can be some sort of market maker that works like Spotify in that there's a pool. Like, so how does pricing work on Spotify? Everyone, everyone's money goes to Spotify and then it's split up based on who gets plays, right? And so it's actually fairly straightforward. Like the, and that's why the, uh, you know, it's not like you, you don't get paid a penny per play or whatever it might be.

• 25:40Ben Thompson?

  It's what's your, what is your share of all plays? And then that's your share of the pool of money that goes to music. And I can understand the consternation artists have about that. But at the end of the day, when you have a completely open market, anyone can put music on Spotify, you need some sort of constraining mechanism to actually apply a price to the stuff that that's in there. And so could there be a market maker on the internet that has a pool of money and everyone goes into it? And then there's some aspect. Of, you know, there's gonna be a huge analytics and measurement problem here that that that needs to be figured out.

• 26:22Ben Thompson?

  But then based on that, it's split up. And so that it's not some sort of uncapped amount or whatever it might be. And by the way, this speaks to that it being a commodity. You don't just like, if you want to have unlimited pricing power, you gotta get out of the pool and you have to have some sort of model that works independently. This is like, look, there's a, there's an amount of money in the world for iron ore. So you could go and dig for iron ore or oil, right? Like you could.

• 26:48Andrew Sharp?

  Well, I mean, that's the thing is like publishers, they have even less leverage than individual musicians because at least music is distinct. One song is distinct from another. I mean, the reason this current information is valuable is because these models need facts. People aren't seeking out pros from the New York Times or anybody else. And so you're not gonna have very much negotiating leverage with anybody that's crawling your site for AI. Because ultimately, the information is available in a bunch of different places.

• 27:18Ben Thompson?

  We're talking about like, we're talking about token generation farms. Like again, it's not even content. It's just like, it, it, it's, you know, statistical association of tokens is what they're looking for.

• 27:28Andrew Sharp?

  Who won the Wizards game? Like, there's gonna be a lot of different places you can go to find out who won the Wizards game. Spoiler, not the Wizards, uh, at least this decade. But, um, that's part of the deal.

• 27:39Ben Thompson?

  Thank you, Andrew GPT. But yes, uh, Sharp GPT. But the, yeah, so this is how I think this market is going to shape out. And just to go back to Finn's point, all this is, everything on the table now is not gonna work. Like, this is, all this discussion is definitely looking out on what might work. And one thing that I have to be cognizant of, and everyone in this space seems to be cognizant of, is not to get bound up in idealism. And you have to sort of look at the cold, hard realities. And that's why, like, look, I don't think the existing publishers are going to survive this. It's going to be something new that comes up. And by the way, maybe it's not. Maybe we actually don't need that much content.

• 28:21Ben Thompson?

  And the L M's are enjoying all the content. There's just gonna be a few people plugging facts in. Again, I think there will be a market for this, but let's be clear about what that market is. That market is mining tokens.

• 28:33Andrew Sharp?

  All right, and that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharptech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out, and if you've got feedback, please email us at [email protected].