Creators Miss Out on AI Agentic Economy, Says Parallel CEO

0:00 In answer to the question, what did you get done this week? You launched index. In in this, like, era of of agentic, right, the agents need the web data and the proprietary datasets. You you, I guess, saw a a gap where the marketplace for that data doesn't exist, then now you think it does. Yeah. We've been, building towards this content marketplace now for the last two and a half years. We started parallel with the notion that agents will use all of the content on the web, thousand x more than humans ever have. And when that happens, the technology that we've built over the last couple of decades isn't enough, but the business models also break down, ads, subscriptions. These more business models no longer work. And that, I think, is the opportunity, for us to figure out how to align the interests of AI agents doing real work along with the content owners who are creating, valuable content that feeds these agents. And that's what index is all about.

1:03 To help the Bloomberg tech audience out, the question, what did you get done this week was posed to you by mister Musk just before you you left Twitter. How do you assign a value then to the data? You've called this index very interesting. Right? On the one side, you have the the agent or the entity the agent is acting on behalf of. And then on the other side, you have the source of the data, who sets a price for a value.

1:26 Yeah. So if you think about other deals that are being done, these deals are typically between a large lab or hyperscaler or Google, alongside a large publishing house. And these are flat fee deals where over time, I don't believe content owners get to participate in the growing economy of agents. Now what's really happening with agents is they are starting to do real work, real knowledge work in the enterprise. So if you think about our customers, our customers span people building AI scientists. Our customers are building AI lawyers. Customers are building for finance, using agents. And all of these, agents that our customers build are doing real work.

2:10 When they produce value, content owners don't get to participate, in that economy of the value being created. With index, what we're trying to do is, build a system where if very valuable work is done using somebody's data, they get more money. Right. If someone has very high quality data, they get paid more. And we've built a model to figure out what this value is, what this marginal contribution is, and it draws upon from this game theoretic concept called Shapley values.

2:44 Let's talk about the Shapley value. Its contribution to the work performed by an AI agent. So, basically, instead of content access, crawls, or citations, you consider the value. I mean but where's the monetary number coming from? What are you pegging it against? And and how? How How do you work out what an agent has eventually learned itself off of? Well, Shapley values has been my obsession for the last three years as we've been working on this. So just in a in a sentence, what Shapley values is is about, like, if a few people decide to collaborate, on building something, in a positive some way where the whole is bigger than the sum of parts, the question is how do you divide up this value? And Shapley value is the concept that tells us the way to divide this value so that everyone is incentivized to participate. The net outcome of using this concept to reward content owners, it creates three really nice properties. One, high quality content gets paid more. Number two, content that gets used in high value work gets paid more. And most importantly, as agents do more work and create more value, content owners grow alongside them, which we believe allows content creation on the web to be sustainable.

4:02 There are a lot of content creators out there right now, Fraher. So how do they sign up to Index? How do you make sure that it's not just quite large, either individuals who are writing? I think of Alix Steel. It's actually those that have got a minor substack, but with really valuable content that somehow the agent has managed to access. How do they access that? Yeah. With index today, we're announcing a collection of launch partners. These span, premium, news publishers like The Atlantic and Fortune to, like, really draw factual amazing content from the PR newswire, business intelligence and data providers, like, PitchBook and traction and ZoomInfo, as well as, independent creators like Alix Steel, Azim Azer, and several others. The really interesting part about this is that we want, everyone, all content owners, big and small Right. To be able to participate in this economy. And we want all agents, not just ones built by large providers, to be able to get access to all of this amazing content.

5:04 Right. We we just have sixty seconds, but, can I ask you about X, the platform for way known as Twitter? Of course. Still using it. Your view of it and and it and it as part of XAI, part of SpaceX? I'm still using it. I'm still calling it Twitter. I think we built a product over a decade that I was there, which endures, in value, forever, And I'm really proud of the the platform that we created. It allows the theme of content access and democratization out in the open versus in permission groups. And that theme is what carries forward into my current company parallel where the goal is to have as much content as possible out in the open for everyone to have access to, everyone's agents to have access to instead of, just a few.