Five Things Tech: Myspace, Pokémon Go, Robots, Russia, Bot Traffic
This is everything you should read about Tech right now.
OpenAI is stumbling into its own Myspace moment: ChatGPT went from the ubiquitous Coke of chatbots to just another player in a category that is rapidly turning into a soft‑drink‑style commodity, with Claude and Gemini quietly dictating both the pace and the direction of the race while OpenAI scrambles to stay relevant. Meanwhile, Pokémon Go players are the accidental heroes of last‑mile delivery, their millions of geotagged snapshots feeding Niantic’s ultra‑precise world model that lets robots triangulate their location down to a few centimeters and finally nail that pizza drop‑off even when GPS flakes out.
China’s robotics boom feels equal parts thrilling and dystopian: deep‑learning‑driven humanoid robots are learning to navigate the physical world the way ChatGPT learned language, by ingesting data until something vaguely like dexterity emerges, and the ambition is to replace legions of factory workers with machines that do not complain, unionize, or ask for bathroom breaks. At the same time, Russia is pulling off a spectacular self‑own: after systematically blocking Meta, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Musk, and everyone else, the Kremlin has now turned much of its own connectivity into a rolling outage, leaving millions of citizens staring at dead‑end apps while their bot armies keep spamming Western inboxes. And on top of all that, Cloudflare’s CEO warns that bots will soon swamp human traffic online, so if you’re still building websites as if only people will visit them, you are already running your stack on an outdated assumption.
Enjoy Five Things Tech! 🤖
The Myspace Dilemma Facing ChatGPT
Will the AI market be any different? No and yes. A year ago, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was a generic name, the Coke or Kleenex of generative-AI chatbots. Today, its competitors, especially Anthropic’s Claude, are advancing quickly. OpenAI’s fall from favor looks inevitable.
But AI appears to work nothing like delivery apps, smartphones, social networks, or even computer operating systems. If ChatGPT becomes outmoded, it won’t be the result of OpenAI losing ground or failing to innovate. Instead, the entire generative-AI sector will have become a commodity, like soft drinks or facial tissues. That process has already begun.
None of the releases by OpenAI in the last 12 months got me excited. Claude and Gemini are setting the pace right now and also the direction of development. OpenAI sits between a rock and hard place now.
How Pokémon Go is giving delivery robots an inch-perfect view of the world
Now Niantic Spatial is using that vast and unparalleled trove of crowdsourced data—images of urban landmarks tagged with super-accurate location markers taken from the phones of hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players around the world—to build a kind of world model, a buzzy new technology that grounds the smarts of LLMs in real-world environments.
The company’s latest product is a model that it says can pinpoint your location on a map to within a few centimeters, based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in view. The firm wants to use it to help robots navigate with greater precision in places where GPS is unreliable.
Interesting turn of events. Millions of people walk around catching imaginary pokemon figures and now those datapoints help delivery bots. I didn’t see that coming.
Inside China’s robotics revolution
As in much of the world, AI has become part of everyday life in China. But what most excites Chinese politicians and industrialists are the strides being made in the field of robotics, which, when combined with advances in AI, could revolutionise the world of work. The technology behind China’s current robotics boom is deep learning, the mathematical engine behind large language models such as ChatGPT, which learn by discerning patterns from huge datasets. Many researchers believe that machines can learn to navigate the physical world the way ChatGPT learned to navigate language: not by following rules, but by absorbing enough data for something like human dexterity to emerge. The aim, for many technologists, is the development of humanoid robots capable of performing factory labour – work that employs hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
The current developments in humanoid robotics are breathtaking, but still I can’t envision having these robots around us all the time.
A superpower goes offline
Telegram would be joining a home screen’s worth of apps that have become useless to Russians. Kremlin policymakers have already blocked or limited access to WhatsApp, along with parent company Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Google’s YouTube, Apple’s FaceTime, Snapchat and X, which like SpaceX is owned by Musk. Encrypted messaging apps Signal and Discord, as well as Japanese-owned Viber, have been inaccessible since 2024. Last month, President Vladimir Putin signed a law requiring telecom operators to block cellular and fixed internet access at the request of the Federal Security Service. Shortly after it took effect on March 3, Moscow residents reported widespread problems with mobile internet, calls and text messages across all major operators for several days, with outages affecting mobile service and Wi-Fi even inside the State Duma.
I am sure that Russian people will continue to figure out how to circumvent the firewalls. Also, I wish they would also take their bot-armies offline that spam Western democracies with their crap.
Online bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO says
Prince explained that bots’ web usage has been increasing alongside the growth of generative AI technology because bots are capable of visiting far more sites to get answers for users’ chatbot queries.
“If a human were doing a task — let’s say you were shopping for a digital camera — and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that’s doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit,” Prince said. “So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account.”
Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google’s web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company is used by one-fifth of all websites. But beyond some other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and bad actors.
I didn’t expect this to happen so soon. So now we have to build websites for humans and agents.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
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— Nico