Speaking at the Financial Times Future of AI Summit in London, Inrupt director and web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee warned that large language models (LLMs) are hoovering up online content and spitting out answers directly to users, without anyone needing to visit a web page.

“If web pages are all read by LLMs, people ask the LLM for the data and the LLM just produces the result, the whole ad-based business model of the web starts to fall apart,” Berners-Lee said.

That model, which fattened the wallets of outfits like Google and Meta, depends on human eyeballs reading the ads. If LLMs are doing the reading and punters just get a tidy summary back, the clicks stop coming and the ad money dries up.

Berners-Lee said this puts the structure of online advertising at risk. “A lot of the web relies on advertising. Advertising relies on people actually reading web pages … if they all assume that a human being is reading the webpage, but the LLM is reading it and the human is not, then we have a problem,” he said.

He reckons AI might offer a long overdue “reset button” for the web, especially as people grow fed up with ads that appear to be eavesdropping on every conversation. Some users, he noted, had been driven “crazy” by overly aggressive targeting.

Sir Tim said: “We need to replace the model with something else.” What that “something else” looks like remains up in the air.

The current regime is hanging on by its fingernails. Google’s parent Alphabet posted $100 billion in quarterly revenue last week and chief executive Sundar Pichai claimed its cloud arm was doing the heavy lifting.

Meta raked in $51.2 billion in Q3, up 26 per cent year on year, even though investors got twitchy about the company’s unhinged spending plans on AI infrastructure.

Mozilla president Mark Surman told the FT audience the ad-funded model is “at a potential crossroads” and warned not to “let a good crisis go to waste.”

He thinks it is the moment to build systems that respect privacy and give users back some agency, saying punters do not want “that monoculture, that loss of choice.” He conceded that the existing setup “is not going away anytime soon” and is more likely to evolve than vanish overnight.

Inrupt chief executive and co-founder John Bruce, who works alongside Berners-Lee, warned that major brands and payment outfits are already getting nervous. They know they might soon become “subordinate to an LLM.”

Bruce added that AI-powered ad surveillance is “about to get to a way worse spot,” suggesting we have not even hit peak creepiness yet.