Human Native is joining Cloudflare

Today, we’re excited to share that Cloudflare has acquired Human Native , a UK-based AI data marketplace specializing in transforming multimedia content into searchable and useful data. Human Native x Cloudflare The Human Native team has spent the past few years focused on helping AI developers create better AI through licensed data. Their technology helps publishers and developers turn messy, unstructured content into something that can be understood, licensed and ultimately valued. They have approached data not as something to be scraped, but as an asset class that deserves structure, transparency and respect. Access to high-quality data can lead to better technical performance. One of Human Native’s customers, a prominent UK video AI company, threw away their existing training data after achieving superior results with data sourced through Human Native. Going forward they are only training on fully licensed, reputably sourced, high-quality content. This gives a preview of what the economic model of the Internet can be in the age of generative AI: better AI built on better data, with fair control, compensation and credit for creators. The Internet needs new economic models For the last 30 years, the open Internet has been based on a fundamental value exchange: creators create content, aggregators (such as search engines or social media) send traffic. Creators can monetize that traffic through advertisements, subscriptions or direct support. This is the economic loop that has powered the explosive growth of the Internet. But it’s under real strain. Crawl-to-referral ratios are skyrocketing, with 10s of thousands of AI and bot crawls per real human visitor, and it’s unclear how multipurpose crawlers are using the content they access. The community of creators who publish on the Internet is a diverse group: news publishers, content creators, financial professionals, technology companies, aggregators and more. But they have one thing in common: They want to decide how their content is used by AI systems. Cloudflare’s work in building AI Crawl Control and Pay Per Crawl is predicated on a simple philosophy: Content owners should get to decide how and when their content is accessed by others. Many of our customers want to optimize their brand and content to make sure it is in every training data set and shows up in every new search; others want to have more control and only allow access if there is direct compensation. Our tools like AI Search , AI Crawl Control and Pay Per Crawl can help, wherever you land in that equation. The important thing is that the content owner gets to decide. With the Human Native team joining Cloudflare, we are accelerating our work in helping customers transform their content to be easily accessed and understood by AI bots and agents in addition to their traditional human audiences. Crawling is complex, expensive in terms of engineering and compute to process the content, and has no guarantees of quality control. A crawled index can contain duplicates, spam, illegal material and many more headaches. Developers are left with messy, unstructured data. We recently...

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