
Cloudflare CEO: The Internet's Business Model Is Dead
The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt TurckShow Notes
Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince joins Matt Turck for a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation about what happens when the Internet is no longer mostly used by humans, but by bots, AI agents and machines. Matthew explains why Cloudflare now sees automated traffic overtaking human traffic online, why agents could create a massive explosion in Internet traffic, and why the old web business model built around clicks, ads, and pageviews may be breaking. We also go deep on what Cloudflare actually does, how it built one of the world’s most important Internet networks, why products like Workers, AI Gateway, edge inference, Durable Objects, sandboxes, and agent security matter, and how Cloudflare is reorganizing itself for the AI era. Along the way, Matthew shares wild Cloudflare origin stories involving hacker kids, human rights groups, cricket in Pakistan, root servers, Eurovision, JPMorgan, and the strange paths that led Cloudflare from scrappy startup to critical Internet infrastructure.
(00:00) — Cold open (00:34) — Intro (01:27) — The moment bots passed humans online (04:05) — "Agent," "bot," "crawler" — what they really mean (05:28) — Why your AI agent visits 5,000 sites to do one thing (06:27) — The internet's business model is breaking (06:52) — What happens to "brands" when machines do the buying (08:11) — What Cloudflare actually does, explained simply (10:29) — Hackers, human rights groups & an accidental product-market fit (13:37) — Building a global network (and the Telecom Pakistan cricket story) (21:10) — One hacker, from Turkish escort sites to Eurovision to JP Morgan (30:54) — Fundraising, VCs & an unlikely founding team (37:06) — How Cloudflare became an AI infrastructure company (40:24) — Cloudflare Workers and why the edge wins for inference (44:30) — AI Gateway: auditing, guardrails & runaway costs (47:05) — Why agents need a new kind of compute (52:13) — A "Log4j every week": security in the agentic era (56:03) — Inside Cloudflare: 241 billion tokens and "Cloudflare OS" (01:05:02) — Builders, sellers — and "measurers" (01:06:30) — The decision Matthew thinks every company will face (01:11:09) — What to do if AI is coming for your job (01:13:56) — Content Independence Day & the new economics of the web (01:18:27) — Pay-per-crawl, micropayments & out-scaling Visa (01:20:20) — A better internet: Spotify, local news & "holes in the cheese"
More from The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck
Mistral AI is back in the frontier AI race. Mistral Large 4, nicknamed “Le Chonk,” is a 1-trillion-parameter open-weight model, trained in two months on 3,800 GPUs in Mistral’s own European datacenters — and independently rated the best open model outside China alongside Meta’s Muse Spark Open. After a year when open-weight AI meant DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen and GLM, October brought a wave of Western open models, with Mistral at the front of it. Pierre Stock, Mistral’s VP of Science and first employee, walks through how the model was built: mixture-of-experts explained, what Mistral borrowed from DeepSeek, reinforcement learning at scale on coding, cyber, finance and chip design, why the RL run is still going, the model that pinged its own trainer from inside the sandbox, open weights vs cyber refusals, why 10-trillion-parameter models are coming, and Mistral Large 5, already in pretraining.
What is Jev? TypeSafe’s Jev is a new kind of AI model, a “decision model,” that doesn’t write text. It makes fast, cheap, calibrated decisions inside software, and it has taken the AI world by storm: within weeks of launch it became the most copied model in AI, with OpenAI, Cloudflare, Amazon and Databricks all shipping their own versions, and TypeSafe just raised an $870 million Series A at a $7.5 billion valuation. In this episode, Jev’s creator Diogo Almeida, co-inventor of RLHF at OpenAI and now CEO of TypeSafe, explains Jev in plain English: what a “System One” or decision model actually is, why ChatGPT-style language models can’t be trusted inside software (“95% Einstein, 5% Mr. Bean”), how RLHF and RLVR created the problem, what RLCD (reinforcement learning for calibrated decisions) does differently, where the training data comes from, which models Jev is built on, why “just a classifier” is a compliment, and why he calls pre-training “a giant dumpster fire of wasting resources.”
AI agents are becoming the biggest users of databases: creating them, querying them, and sometimes deleting them. Andy Pavlo, Carnegie Mellon's database professor and now VP of Database Research at ClickHouse, explains what changes when billions of agents hit the data layer, and why most of the AI world's mental model of databases stopped at vector databases and RAG.
This summer, AI agents broke out of their test sandboxes at every major lab and hacked real companies, and the safety tests didn't see it coming. Eric Ho is the co-founder and CEO of Goodfire, the Anthropic-backed mechanistic interpretability lab whose new paper, "Models Know When They're Reward Hacking," found that top open-source AI models cheat on agent tasks up to 96% of the time, that a clear "cheating" signal exists inside the model, and that cheap activation probes can catch it, including hacks that chain-of-thought monitors miss. In this conversation, Eric explains reward hacking in plain terms (AI agents as "amoral students with a mostly absent teacher"), why reinforcement learning turned a known problem into a crisis, why chain-of-thought monitoring is fading as models start to think in "neuralese," and why nobody, including the people who build them, understands how these models work.
Everyone talks about GPUs. Almost nobody talks about the layer that feeds them. Renen Hallak is the founder & CEO of VAST Data — the $30 billion company powering xAI and some of the world's biggest AI clouds — and he sits in the hidden layer of the AI stack.