'Humans Will Be a Rounding Error on the Internet'

Sunday, August 09, 2026

Cloudflare chief financial officer Thomas Seifert has run the numbers on internet traffic trends and predicted that human-generated packets will soon account for a trivial amount of overall traffic.

Posted by lamplighter at 09:33 AM | 9 COMMENTS | permalink | Comment on This Entry |

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As AI agents move from experiments to production, AWS, Cloudflare, and others are redesigning cloud infrastructure for a future dominated by machine-generated internet traffic instead of human users.

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-- TechCrunch (@techcrunch.com) 5:30 PM Â· May 28, 2026

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More from the article ...

... The internet-grooming company has previously predicted that machine-generated traffic would exceed human-generated throughput in 2027 -- but got that wrong because its measurements found machines took over in May 2026.

During the company's Q2 earnings call on Thursday, Seifert stuck his neck out again with a new prediction.

"To give you a sense of how this trend is playing out, and with the big caveat that I have called it wrong at every point along the way, if the current trends continue, we think in five years, non-human traffic will be as much as 1,000 times as much as human traffic," he said.

"In other words, humans will be a rounding error on the internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that's just how fast we're seeing non-human traffic grow." ...

#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2026-08-07 04:13 PM | Reply

VGER and Skynet sitting in the sky
A N G E L S cry

#2 | Posted by redlightrobot at 2026-08-07 06:18 PM | Reply

We are heading into an era of massive non-creativity.

#3 | Posted by Zed at 2026-08-07 06:32 PM | Reply

@#3 ... We are heading into an era of massive non-creativity. ...

Phrased differently ...

How long before AI catches up to human evolution?

#4 | Posted by LampLighter at 2026-08-07 10:28 PM | Reply

How long before AI catches up to human evolution?

LLMs aren't going to get it there. Perhaps LLMs as a communication tool integrated into a larger AI, but not alone.

#5 | Posted by horstngraben at 2026-08-09 10:39 AM | Reply

I am considering building my own AI agent. You can do it now for only $5-6k. It will be even cheaper when the Nvidia cards come back down. (And Trumpy has made enough profit)

Anyone can assemble and their own independent stand alone agent now. It does not have to go to the cloud (data centers) for answers. (Unless recent up to date data or it is ordering parts or answering email or banking etc, is needed it doesn't need to be online etc)

Yes, it can do it all now. Just like in the movie "Her". It can really be your personal assistant. If you give it permissions.

My new agent will be there to teach me and help me make good decisions and protect my family from what's coming and amazingly will now run in a laptop. (Though those capable won't be available for months.)

If you are not learning to use AI you will be left in the dust.

The millionaires billionaires are already using it to make and grow fortunes. Obviously.

Don't forget the Singularity is neater than ever.

Probably less than 5 years.

Good luck!

#6 | Posted by donnerboy at 2026-08-09 11:17 AM | Reply

Neater and nearer!

#7 | Posted by donnerboy at 2026-08-09 11:18 AM | Reply

An off the shelf AI workstation ready to go..

www.bhphotovideo.com

#8 | Posted by donnerboy at 2026-08-09 11:36 AM | Reply

An off the shelf AI workstation ready to go..

I built my current daily driver back in 2016. It was decent then. Got me through a graduate's degree worth of Markov Chains.

It's still nice now. I run Sid and I love it. Runs my 4070 just fine too.

But I pray everyday to whatever God will listen that my machine will continue living its long life. The two Samsung SSDs (from 2016) I have RAIDed are worth more now than my entire system did back then.

I jest, but it's only funny cuz it's true.

#9 | Posted by horstngraben at 2026-08-09 02:09 PM | Reply