00:00So in answer to the question, what did you get done this week, you launched index. In this era of
00:07agentic, right, the agents need the web data and the proprietary data sets. You, I guess, saw a gap where
00:16the marketplace for that data doesn't exist. Then now you think it does.
00:20Yeah, we've been building towards this content marketplace now for the last two and a half years. We started parallel
00:27with the notion that agents will use all of the content on the web thousand X more than humans ever
00:34have.
00:34And when that happens, the technology that we've built over the last couple of decades isn't enough. But the business
00:41models also break down, ads, subscriptions. These business models no longer work.
00:47And that, I think, is the opportunity for us to figure out how to align the interests of AI agents
00:54doing real work along with the content owners who are creating valuable content that feeds these agents. And that's what
01:02index is all about.
01:02To help the Bloomberg Tech audience out, the question, what did you get done this week, was posed to you
01:07by Mr. Musk just before you left Twitter. How do you assign a value then to the data? You've called
01:13this index very interesting, right?
01:16On the one side, you have the agent or the entity the agent is acting on behalf of. And then
01:22on the other side, you have the source of the data who sets a price or a value.
01:26Yeah. So if you think about other deals that are being done, these deals are typically between a large lab
01:33or a hyperscaler or Google alongside a large publishing house.
01:39And these are flat fee deals where over time, I don't believe content owners get to participate in the growing
01:46economy of agents.
01:47Now, what's really happening with agents is they are starting to do real work, real knowledge work in the enterprise.
01:55So if you think about our customers, our customers span people building AI scientists.
01:59Our customers are building AI lawyers. Customers are building for finance using agents.
02:05And all of these agents that our customers build are doing real work.
02:10When they produce value, content owners don't get to participate in that economy of the value being created.
02:18With index, what we're trying to do is build a system where if very valuable work is done using somebody's
02:26data, they get more money.
02:29If someone has very high quality data, they get paid more.
02:35And we've built a model to figure out what this value is, what this marginal contribution is.
02:40And it draws apart from this game theory concept called Shapley values.
02:44Let's talk about the Shapley value. It's contribution to the work performed by an AI agent.
02:49So basically, instead of content access crawls or citations, you consider the value.
02:54I mean, but where's the monetary number coming from? What are you pegging it against?
02:58And how? How do you work out what the AI agent has eventually learned itself off of?
03:05Well, Shapley values has been my obsession for the last three years as we've been working on this.
03:10So just in a sentence, what Shapley values is, is about like if a few people decide to collaborate on
03:17building something in a positive some way,
03:19where the whole is bigger than the sum of parts, the question is, how do you divide up this value?
03:24And Shapley values is the concept that tells us the way to divide this value so that everyone is incentivized
03:31to participate.
03:32The net outcome of using this concept to reward content owners, it creates three really nice properties.
03:40One, high quality content gets paid more.
03:43Number two, content that gets used in high value work gets paid more.
03:48And most importantly, as agents do more work and create more value, content owners grow alongside them,
03:56which we believe allows content creation on the web to be sustainable.
04:02There are a lot of content creators out there right now.
04:05So how do they sign up to Index?
04:07How do you make sure that it's not just quite large, either individuals who are writing, I think of Alex
04:12Heath,
04:13or it's actually those that have got a minor substack, but with really valuable content that somehow the agent has
04:17managed to access?
04:18How do they access that?
04:19Yeah, with Index today, we're announcing a collection of launch partners.
04:25These span premium news publishers like The Atlantic and Fortune to really draw factual amazing content from the PR newswire,
04:33business intelligence and data providers like PitchBook and Traction and ZoomInfo,
04:40as well as independent creators like Alex Heath, Azimazar, and several others.
04:46The really interesting part about this is that we want everyone, all content owners, big and small, to be able
04:56to participate in this economy.
04:58And we want all agents, not just ones built by large providers, to be able to get access to all
05:03of this amazing content.
05:04Parag, we just have 60 seconds, but can I ask you about X, the platform for me known as Twitter?
05:09Of course.
05:10You're still using it, your view of it, and as part of XAI, as part of SpaceX.
05:16I'm still using it.
05:17I'm still calling it Twitter.
05:19I think we built a product over a decade that I was there, which endures in value forever.
05:28And I'm really proud of the platform that we created.
05:31It allows the theme of content access and democratization out in the open versus in permission groups.
05:38And that theme is what carries forward into my current company parallel, where the goal is to have as much
05:44content as possible out in the open for everyone to have access to,
05:49everyone's agents to have access to, instead of just a few.
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