The internet was created by scientists that wanted to share research papers over computer networks. It started with ARPANET in 1969 and has transformed into something completely different. Hyperlinks enabled browsing of linked pages, and link aggregators like Yahoo! and later search engines like AltaVista (and eventually Google) have brought us the internet of today. HTTPS allowed e-commerce and fast internet connections led to explosion of media on the internet. But the internet today is still a familiar place to the one from the late 1990s.
The last 5 years have ushered in the era of unstopable advances in Machine Learning and LLMs (Large Language Models) which are about to change everything. The internet is finally going to change and will not resemble the old place from the 1990s. Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Mistral AI, DeepSeek and countless others are where people go to get answers. They do not go to a search engine like Google, enter a query, click through websites on the results page, and read the content on each page till their questions are answered. The users open their choice of LLM app and ask what they are looking for. The LLM responds with the answer in seconds. There is no searching, clicking on links, or going to websites.
LLMs get their knowledge by being trained on vast amounts of data. This can be books, novels, manuscripts, and websites on the internet. All the text is converted into numbers (embeddings) and the model (a numeric representation of all this data) knows which words are often written together. Then it can answer the question of the user by taking the prompt text, converting it into embeddings, and outputting more tokens to answer the question (which is later converted back from numbers to english text or text in another language). This breakthrough has changed how we use our computers.
Some startups like Perplexity AI are going beyond text answers and focusing on widgets with Stock market charts, Sports score boards, Weather charts, News article feeds, etc. Instead of people looking for things on the internet, everything is brought to the user. This has changed the dynamic of the internet. If users are not going to your website to read, should you be writing? All this text will be ingested by some Machine Learning model and incorporated into the answers generated by LLMs without the full text of the author, or visibility or credit. Perplexity and few other LLMs also lean more towards RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) where the output text contains links to websites or blogs where this content was obtained from. The motivation behind this was less to do with giving credit to authors and websites, and more about providing citation behind the answers so users trust them.
Even when users go to websites today, they use AI Summarization tools to convert all the text into a short summary. So original text content is not being read by humans anymore. It exists solely for ingestion into Machine Learning models. Which brings up the question: are websites dead? The answer is: yes, mostly. We will still have websites for Banks, or Travel websites where we go to transact. But people will not be going to websites to read and look for answers. Media will continue to exist. People need entertainment and video content (both short form on TikTok and Instagram Reels, and long form on Netflix) will continue to be consumed.
So the future of the internet looks very different. No web browsers, no search engines, no websites. Just apps for LLMs, Banks, Travel agencies, and Media.