WWW inventor warns of a threat to the Internet advertising model due to AI

The advertising business model that supports the Internet economy could collapse due to the development of generative artificial intelligence, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web (WWW), warned at the summit Financial Times Future of AI in London.

"If all web pages are read only by big language models, and people ask them for data and get results, the whole advertising business model of the Internet will start to disintegrate," he said .

"Most of the web relies on advertising. Advertising relies on people actually reading web pages... If everybody assumes that a human is reading the page, but in fact a large language model is reading it and the human is not, then we have a problem," Berners-Lee added .

He believes that we need to think about how to replace this model with something else.

At the same time, the Financial Times writes that there are no signs of a collapse in web advertising yet. Last week, Alphabet (Google's parent company) reported a record quarterly revenue of $100 billion. Meta also reported third-quarter revenues of $51.2 billion, up 26% year-on-year.

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