"“I can give you my best theory, and I'll caveat this by, no one knows. This is what I hope will happen and what I've wanted to happen for a long time. What really makes sense in a world of agents is we try a sort of micropayment-based approach. So, if my agent wants to come read Nick Thompson's article, Nick Thompson or The Atlantic can set a price for the agent to read it - might be different than a human reading it.”"
"“My agent can read it, pay $0.17, and give me a summary of that. If I want to go read the whole article, pay $1, or however that works. If my agent wants to calculate something for me that's really difficult to do, it can go rent some cloud compute somewhere and pay for that, but I think there will be need to be a new economic model for these agents doing lots of small transactions and exchanges of value with each other on behalf of their human controllers or whatever, all of the time.”"
"“Altman was asked point blank by a media executive what he thinks the future of publishing will look like on the web. His answer, in short: micropayments. To be clear, payments made by AI agents, not readers directly.”"
A conversation centers on how media companies could survive declining traditional search and increasing use of AI agents that browse on behalf of people. Sam Altman proposes a micropayment-based economic model for agent-driven access to content. In this model, an agent pays a set price to read an article, potentially different from what a human would pay. The agent could pay a small amount to obtain a summary, while a higher payment would be required to access the full article. For tasks requiring computation, the agent could pay for cloud compute. The approach implies ongoing small transactions and value exchanges between agents and content providers, requiring a new economic model.
Read at Nieman Lab
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