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Tim Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989. But he has been dissatisfied with the way his original vision for the web has panned out.

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Personal artificial intelligence assistants that know our health status and legal history inside out. The ability to transfer your data from one place to another seamlessly without any roadblocks.  

These are just some of the predictions for the future of the web from the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, on the 35th anniversary of its invention.

Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the world-changing technology in 1989 while working at CERN, the Swiss particle physics research center. 

The London-born computer scientist submitted a proposal for an information management system to help his colleagues share information among themselves. 

When it started, I couldn’t have predicted that it was going to be like this, this change.

Tim Berners-Lee

Inventor, World Wide Web

Berners-Lee got to continue working on his idea for this information sharing system, and by 1991, the World Wide Web was up and running.

When Tim Berners-Lee started work on the World Wide Web 35 years ago, he had no idea it was about to become the ubiquitous force it is today. “I couldn’t have predicted that it was going to be like this, this change,” he told CNBC.

Fabrice Coffrini | AFP via Getty Images

In 1993, Berners-Lee convinced CERN to release the Web protocol and source code into the public domain without any patents or fees. Berners-Lee has attributed the runaway success of the web to this decision.

Berners-Lee remembers what things were like when the web got started 35 years ago. “When it started, I couldn’t have predicted that it was going to be like this, this change,” he told CNBC.

He could tell there were signs the web was going to grow in a big way early on, though. Traffic to the very first website, info.cern.ch, “was going up by a factor of 10 every year, so doubling every four months.” 

“We lost track of the logs because they cut off,” Berners-Lee recalls. “Now this is going to be a serious thing. We need to make sure it doesn’t collapse.”

In the decades that have passed since the web’s creation, Berners-Lee sees some of the downsides that have come about. For one, social media feeds tailored by AI algorithms have meant people “feeling angry and upset, or hateful,” he says.

Meanwhile, the ease of producing content on social media platforms and spinning up new websites and blogs has led to a “disempowerment” for people and businesses — and a loss of ownership over our data, he adds.

But Berners-Lee still has some optimism for the future. Here are some of his top predictions for what the web will look like in the next 35 years.

Prediction 1: Everyone will have a personal AI assistant 

One of Berners-Lee’s big predictions is that AI will transform the way we interact with the web.  

With the arrival of generative AI tools like Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, tech firms are betting consumers will become much more engaged with digital chatbots to get information they need and help them produce written materials and even code. 

There are already firms trying to reimagine what our interaction with the web will look like using AI-powered devices, including Samsung with its Galaxy S24 smartphone, and U.S. startup Humane AI with its wearable Pin device. 

You will have an AI assistant that works for you, like a doctor.

Tim Berners-Lee

Inventor, World Wide Web

Berners-Lee thinks that one day we’ll have AI assistants that work for us — similar to our doctors, lawyers, and bankers.

“Some people worry about whether, in 35 years, AI will be more powerful than us,” Berners-Lee told CNBC via a Zoom video call last week. 

“One of the things I predict — but it’s something we may have to fight for — is you will have an AI assistant, which you can trust, and it works for you, like a doctor,” Berners-Lee said.  

Robert Blumofe, global chief technology officer of Akamai, said he thinks the web will cease being something that humans use — and that AI agents will take the reins on our behalf. 

“You can imagine a world years from now where the web is a realm of AI agents and humans no longer effectively use the web,” Blumofe told CNBC in an interview last week. 

“It would all be done through AI agents; you would never go directly to your bank account online, or your health provider online, or any e-commerce sites.”

Akamai was founded in response to a challenge Berners-Lee posed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in early 1995 to create a new way of delivering web content to end users faster.

Three decades after inventing the web, Tim Berners-Lee has some ideas on how to fix it

Blumofe still thinks we’ll go online for entertainment TV shows, movies, and video games. But he thinks a lot of the daily functions of our online lives will in future be managed by AI. 

“Human beings can go back to our lives in the physical world greeting each other face to face as a physical experience, rather than a virtual experience,” he said. 

Prediction 2: We’ll take true ownership of our data across all platforms — including VR 

Another thing Berners-Lee is forecasting is a web in which we’ll all have full control of our data. 

So, rather than handing away ownership of our data to Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other tech giants, we’ll instead be able to own our data through a data store, or “pod.” 

“You’ll think of your data pod as your digital space, you’ll think of it as being one thing you’re very comfortable with,” Berners-Lee explains. 

Pods are a technology Berners-Lee is working on with his startup Inrupt.  

Tim Berners-Lee is forecasting is a web in which we’ll all have full control of our data. So, rather than handing away ownership of our data to Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other tech giants, we’ll instead be able to own our data through a data store, or “pod.”

Sebastian Derungs | Afp via Getty Images

Inrupt is behind something called the Solid protocol, which “aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.”

In 2022, the firm raised $30 million from venture capital firms including Forte Ventures, Akamai, and Glasswing Ventures. 

You can go do things with a VR headset, and then when you take the VR headset off, you could do it with a huge screen. And whenever you move, you can grab your phone and the experience will be as one. It should very smoothly go between different devices. 

Tim Berners-Lee

Inventor, World Wide Web

In Berners-Lee’s vision for a future web, you’ll be able to use your digital pod to access all your essential applications for instance, email across your phone, but also your laptop, desktop computer, and bigger screens like TVs.

Berners-Lee added that his idea is for us to have a set of “trust apps” that we can allow to communicate with each other to share information and do important tasks much faster.  

Take, for example, buying flights. Berners-Lee predicts that the future experience for the web will be one where you can use your wallet to purchase flights off a flight aggregator, and then give it access to data you entrust it with to come up with plans for what to do at your destination. 

“All of your to do lists, calendar events and so on, and all the different parts of your data, will come together, so the ability to live your life becomes much more powerful.” 

Chintan Patel, chief technology officer for software firm Cisco in the U.K., said he thinks the web is ultimately moving to place that’s open and where information can be shared more easily.

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“Even though we have seen increasingly the web becoming a little fragmented with more siloed platforms — more information is collected, sold, even misused in many cases,” Patel said.

However, he noted that OpenAI’s ChatGPT — and several other popular generative AI tools — are powered by data sourced from the open web.

“For all its faults, the web has brought way more benefits to society and made many more things possible,” Patel said.  

Berners-Lee predicts his vision for the web will also go a step further with virtual and mixed reality, where the physical and digital world both interact through powerful headsets, according to Berners-Lee. 

“You can go do things with a VR headset, and then when you take the VR headset off, you could do it with a huge screen,” he said. “And whenever you move, you can grab your phone and the experience will be as one. It should very smoothly go between different devices.”

Mixed reality is a new dimension for accessing the web experts expect we’ll get more used to over time.

“There’s going to be some great shifts happening in terms of some serious digital connectivity,” Patel told CNBC in an interview. 

“It will be called by then some form of spatial computing and spatial environment which won’t be something we are looking for, but an immersive experience delivered to us.” 

Prediction 3: A Big Tech company could get broken up 

Another thing Berners-Lee says might happen in the future is a big tech company being forced to break up. 

Last week, the European Union’s landmark Digital Markets Act (DMA), which forces tech giants to change their platforms to allow for competitor products to flourish, officially came into force, in a major step that advocates hope will lead to a healthier tech competition landscape. 

If a tech firm breaches its obligations under the DMA, the European Commission can enforce some meaty legal measures. That includes fines worth up to 10% of a company’s global annual revenues, or 20% for repeat offenders. 

Things are changing so quickly. AI is changing very, very quickly. There are monopolies in AI. Monopolies changed pretty quickly back in the web.

Tim Berners-Lee

Inventor, World Wide Web

In some extreme cases, the Commission can demand the breakup of companies — although most antitrust lawyers think such an outcome is unlikely, given the legal hurdles Brussels may face. 

Berners-Lee said he always prefers it when tech companies “do the right thing by themselves” before regulators step in. “That’s always been the spirit of the internet.” 

He uses the example of the Data Transfer Initiative, a private initiative that launched in 2018 and is now backed by the likes of Google, Apple, and Meta, to encourage portability of photos, videos and other data between their platforms. 

“Maybe the companies were prompted a bit by the possibility of regulation,” Berners-Lee said. “But this was an independent thing.” 

However, he added: “Things are changing so quickly. AI is changing very, very quickly. There are monopolies in AI. Monopolies changed pretty quickly back in the web.” 

“Maybe at some point in the future, agencies will have to work to break up big companies, but we don’t know which company that will be,” Berners-Lee said. 

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.

It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”

Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.

More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.

It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.

Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.

Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.

Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.

OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.

Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”

“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.

Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.

“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”

WATCH: Microsoft Copilot beginning of a seismic shift in AI integration, says Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are ‘not good’

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are 'not good'

President Trump’s new tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from over 100 countries will have an effect on consumers, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC on Friday. Investors will feel the pain, too.

Microsoft’s stock dropped almost 6% in the past two days, as the Nasdaq wrapped up its worst week in five years.

“As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good,” Ballmer said, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin that was tied to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration. “It creates opportunity to be a serious, long-term player.”

Ballmer was sandwiched in between Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and current CEO Satya Nadella for the interview.

“I took just enough economics in college — that tariffs are actually going to bring some turmoil,” said Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014. Gates, Microsoft’s first CEO, convinced Ballmer to join the company in 1980.

Gates, Ballmer and Nadella attended proceedings at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Friday to celebrate its first half-century.

Between the tariffs and weak quarterly revenue guidance announced in January, Microsoft’s stock is on track for its fifth straight month of declines, which would be the worst stretch since 2009. But the company remains a leader in the PC operating system and productivity software markets, and its partnership with startup OpenAI has led to gains in cloud computing.

“I think that disruption is very hard on people, and so the decision to do something for which disruption was inevitable, that needs a lot of popular support, and nobody could game theorize exactly who is going to do what in response,” Ballmer said, regarding the tariffs. “So, I think citizens really like stability a lot. And I hope people — individuals who will feel this, because people are feeling it, not just the stock market, people are going to feel it.”

Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, is among Microsoft’s biggest fans. He said he’s the company’s largest investor. In 2014, shortly after he bought the basketball team for $2 billion, he held over 333 million shares of the stock, according to a regulatory filing.

“I’m not going to probably have 50 more years on the planet,” he said. “But whatever minutes I have, I’m gonna be a large Microsoft shareholder.” He said there’s a bright future for computing, storage and intelligence. Microsoft launched the first Azure services while Ballmer was CEO.

Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Microsoft, which pledged to spend $80 billion on AI-enabled data center infrastructure in the current fiscal year, has stopped discussions or pushed back the opening of facilities in the U.S. and abroad.

JPMorgan Chase’s chief economist, Bruce Kasman, said in a Thursday note that the chance of a global recession will be 60% if Trump’s tariffs kick in as described. His previous estimate was 40%.

“Fifty years from now, or 25 years from now, what is the one thing you can be guaranteed of, is the world needs more compute,” Nadella said. “So I want to keep those two thoughts and then take one step at a time, and then whatever are the geopolitical or economic shifts, we’ll adjust to it.”

Gates, who along with co-founder Paul Allen, sought to build a software company rather than sell both software and hardware, said he wasn’t sure what the economic effects of the tariffs will be. Today, most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from software. It also sells Surface PCs and Xbox consoles.

“So far, it’s just on goods, but you know, will it eventually be on services? Who knows?” said Gates, who reportedly donated around $50 million to a nonprofit that supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ losing campaign.

— CNBC’s Alex Harring contributed to this report.

WATCH: There will be many LLM winners, says infrastructure investor Morrison

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AppLovin can offer TikTok ‘much stronger bid than others,’ CEO says

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AppLovin can offer TikTok 'much stronger bid than others,' CEO says

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AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.

Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.

“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.

The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid. 

“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.

AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.

Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.

WATCH: AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

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