The AI Labyrinth 🧩🤖

👀 TLDR

In this week’s What’s Appening, we bring you the next chapter in the fight against web crawlers ‘stealing’ data to train AI. Cloudflare has had enough, and it has devised a cunning plan to combat the bots with its AI Labyrinth. We also have news on DoorDash’s Klarna integration (pay for those McNuggets in bite-sized chunks), Meta messing with AI comments on Instagram, gaming accessibility, how AGI might be further away than we think, and more!

🎬 Our Top Take

🕷️🚫 AI – Cloudflare Has An Ingenious Plan for Web Crawlers

How do you stop web crawlers from taking your (sometimes valuable) data? The existing robot.txt file protocol has always been something of a gentleman’s agreement, politely asking bots to stop scraping data rather than preventing them from doing so. Today, it’s a huge problem, particularly as AI companies simply seem to be ignoring the norms of the web. Network service provider Cloudflare, however, has a solution – an AI Labyrinth. The AI Labyrinth is basically a vast series of web pages. To you or me, the web pages will look like gobbledygook, but to the bot it’s a honeypot, catching them in a near-endless loop of nonsense. You might feel this is extreme, as we all want AI to improve, but the companies must play by the rules (and we don’t just mean the big names like OpenAI, either). Hopefully, initiatives like this persuade them to access data ethically and pay for it when required. About a third of Fortune 500 companies use Cloudflare, and it has millions of customers worldwide. They can now opt in to the AI Labyrinth to start protecting the data they hold on their websites. #AILabyrinth Read more here.

📲 App of the Week: Kagi

Competition in the search engine market is brutal, and it’s difficult enough to get people to switch from Chrome for free, never mind asking them to pay for it. So how does Kagi, a search engine that will cost you up to $25 p/m to use, make its pitch? It’s fairly compelling, actually, as Kagi promotes itself as a kind of pure form of search: get what you are looking for without ads, data collection, or anything else that enriches internet companies and makes you a ‘product.’ It has bundles of other neat features, including AI capabilities. We aren’t going to recommend you part with your hard-earned cash immediately, but we can tell you that Kagi has a free trial offer (100 searches) so you can see for yourself if it’s the game changer it claims to be. Check it out here.

🧐 Stat of the Week: 1%

📈📉 AGI – New Benchmark Suggests There’s A Long Way to Go

There has been a broad consensus, reinforced by most AI leaders, that we are hurtling toward the stage of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). That’s basically the tipping point, where AI can master any task that a human can. Yet, a new benchmark to test AI capabilities, which involved the sorting of a series of abstract shapes and colors, flummoxed even the most powerful models available today. The AI models scored an average of 1% in the ‘test,’ whereas human participants scored an average of 60%. Yay, humans! #AGITest Read more here.

🗞️ Other Stories

📍 Meanwhile at 3Advance

You know you’re surviving and thriving for St Patrick’s Day/Week/Month when you walk in the NYC Parade on the 17th and still manage to make it to an 8 am reception the very next day. ;) Paul and Darren did just that - representing Queen’s University Belfast along 5th Avenue, then visiting the Bank of Ireland hub to see the Irish VP (AKA the “Tánaiste”) at another great Digital Irish event. Check out Paul’s full recap on LinkedIn here. All of this was in the middle of Shift's successful St. Patrick’s Day launch, kicking off with events across 80 US cities! Not bad for a few months work and a few days play! ☘️ Stay tuned for more, or sign up to Shift.irish for future announcements.

📣 Promos

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