Azeem Azhar

I've even got the t-shirt.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to give our guest an easy ride.

Welcome to the show, Matthew.

Thanks for having me.

We're at an inflection point in the way the internet gets used.

How broken is the content model that has funded it for the last 25 years?

As you say, it's something that's been going on for a few years.

I think Google was early with this idea of the one box, the one box at the top that constructed an answer and delivered what we wanted, which is we wanted the temperature in X, or we wanted to know the answer to a simple recipe.

And this seemed to be, as you say, the evolution.

But there is this change because

As people move towards ChatGPT, and I think OpenAI claim 700 to 800 million weekly users of ChatGPT, and I think there's some evidence that for every year that you use ChatGPT, you do 8% fewer Google searches.

That starts to, as you say, break this relationship.

But I'm just curious about whether...

What we're seeing is the amber warning signal, or is it the red light?

I mean, it's a very appealing notion.

It's similar to what we've seen with recorded music.

You get the rights agencies collect revenue from all over the shop and they figure out how to apportion it

I guess one of the things that struck me about what's been happening with this shift to what you call answer engines is that it's unmasked a fundamental leakiness about the internet anyway.

The internet was such that collectively all of the content amounted to much more than

adding linearly, arithmetically, any single piece of content.