Julien, for someone who isn't the most computer illiterate what are these bots doing, harvesting information?

A.I. such as ChatGPT need lots of inputs to train the models.

Harvesting blindly tons of websites if one way to cheaply build a base.

They absolutely don't care about copyright or intellectual property. The mentality is "if it's on Internet, it's free (to use)".

Cloud business model are based on traditional usage where you store your data with them and access when needed.
Uploading data to the cloud is free but they will charge you for downloading.

Problem with A.I. in the cloud is that they siphon huge amounts of data to the cloud (free), crunch their models for long periods of times (paying for CPU) but then the output is tiny in comparison.

Clouds might have to reconsider their business cases, they are basically subsiding A.I. companies right now.

Julien

I think Google is realizing they are late in the A.I. game... and they released the Kraken (i.e. = Googlebot slurping websites).

They were more than 50% of the bandwidth in the past few days and are not honoring the crawl delays in the robots.txt file.

So... I'm blocking Google for 1 month. Not good for search rankings but it's slowing down the website response time but a factor of 50. They are just parsing all the user collections with all the possible filters and sorting.

Utterly useless!

Julien