Why 99% of Internet Traffic Will Soon Be Bots | Tiago Sada

Tiago Sada (0:00)

Cloudflare just announced that now, more than 50% of the traffic online is bots. I expect that to be 99.999% very soon. Well, actually, bot's not human.

SPEAKER_2 (0:11)

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to MTS. Today, we are joined with Tiago Sada. He is the Chief Product Officer at Tools for Humanity. They are the company that is building world. I know you guys last night at Money 2020 announced a ton of stuff about what's new in the world ecosystem. Can you just give me a quick summary? What's going on? What did you guys announce?

Tiago Sada (0:28)

For sure. So first, thanks so much for having me. It's super fun to be here in your new space. It's awesome.

Well, we announced what we call World ID for Finance. So it's a new stack of financial products that bring trust to your banks or investment firms, where the risks with AI are getting really high. And so specifically, there is a new plugin that we've built with Zoom and integration, where when you're having a Zoom call, you can actually get a verified blue badge to prove that you're not a deepfake, which is super important for many use cases we can get into. We are also doing some updates to our Agent Kit. So as agentic finance and just agents continue to grow, you can use World ID to prove that you're a good bot rather than a bad bot. And then we're also upgrading our consumer product, the World ID app, to bring all of these things to consumers. So a bunch of product launches specifically focus on the finance ecosystem, and it's been blowing up, so it's been really cool to see.

SPEAKER_2 (1:23)

Oh my gosh, that's exciting. Okay, lots of stuff that we can get into.

I want to first start with the deepfakes, because I'm super interested in that. What's the problem right now? Like, can you just tell folks the scale of the problem when it comes to deepfakes, Zoom? Like, where are we?

Tiago Sada (1:38)

Yes, so I think probably all of us at this point have read some story on the news or on Twitter about some CFOs, some employees, maybe some people that you know, that they got a call pretending to be someone, and they asked them for money, or they told them something and they acted on that. And then afterwards it turned out to be a deep fake. And I've heard this everywhere from executives that we work with, like really big firms that wired like millions and millions of dollars to like my uncle who like got a deep fake and thought he was my cousin.

SPEAKER_2 (2:07)

Yeah, I've had like 20 stories of someone who gets a DM on Telegram from an account that's hacked, but it actually is that person, and saying, this happened to DC, I think I'm allowed to share that. His Telegram got hacked, and then often they send a link to like, oh, we should catch up a Calendly link. And then when you join the Calendly link, it's an actual, it's them, but a deepfake version of them. So it's like a friend and their actual account, and then a deepfake version of them. Like that's freaky.

Tiago Sada (2:31)

Exactly. And this is just exploding because just recently, we crossed a threshold where models can now create video of more than 50, of more than 60 FPS frames per second in real time. And so what that means is that you used to, for deepfakes, have to like pre-generate them and then use them. It was complicated, but now you can in real time be generating these like really sophisticated images.

And so of course, many industries, but especially the financial industry is like really concerned about this, right? Like imagine, for example, one of our design partners for this open exchange and open exchange is maybe not very well known for most people, but it is in the financial space because what they do is they facilitate all the earnings calls from public companies. So you can imagine like what happens if a deepfake version of a CEO gets on an earnings call, shares some news that moves stock price. It doesn't matter whether five minutes later or two hours later, you realize that was a deepfake, the stock already moved, right? And millions of dollars have gone and moved and like even companies can blow up just for that, right? And so all over the financial ecosystem, this is something that people are incredibly concerned about, whether it's internal conversations, conversations externally. And so we're starting with like high-risk individuals, right? With the executives and the CEOs and all of them. But you can imagine that as AI continues to advance, you want that to actually trickle down throughout the whole organization. So we've partnered with Zoom. We were actually in Zoomtopia the next two days with them in Los Angeles, launching this together with their CEO.