Frontier Content: How to survive online in the age of AI

• Guillermo Rauch, CEO of AI startup Vercel, coined the term 'frontier content' recently.
• AI models and chatbots are changing how online information is consumed, impacting website traffic.

Guillermo Rauch, CEO of AI startup Vercel, recently coined the term "frontier content" to describe the type of information that will help website owners survive in the new AI era.

ChatGPT has stoked a boom in large language models and chatbots that have ingested everything on the internet and can answer questions convincingly.

This is beginning to upend how information is consumed online. Until now, search engines and social media platforms distributed most content. Now, AI models and chatbots could take over, which creates a challenge for online content creators.

If AI models and bots answer questions directly, users won't visit websites and apps as much and these businesses will sell fewer subscriptions and may see advertising revenue fall.

Rauch's answer is to rely more on frontier content, which is a combination of exclusive, original information delivered at top speed, along with unique, individual perspectives and experiences.

"The baseline to survive will be producing frontier content, having great content velocity," he told me in a recent interview. Without that, "you just became a fact in an AI summary," he warned.

Closing the information gap

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, the most obvious and glaring deficiency was that it lacked up-to-date information.

The underlying AI models take at least 3 months to be trained on mountains of data. That, by definition, left a knowledge gap where recent information was not included in the training process.

"In the following 18 months, the tech industry went haywire solving that problem. And it's now an effectively solved problem," Rauch said.

"Grounding" techniques, such as retrieval-augmented generation, are now popular additional steps where new information is injected into the AI model Q&A process so users get fresher, more accurate answers.

At the "bleeding edge"

The result is that AI chatbots and similar tools can now answer a lot more questions.

"AIs will be so knowledgeable in the vast majority of topics and news," Rauch said. "What's going to stand out the most to users of the internet is content that is at the very bleeding edge that the AIs have not been trained on, and have not even received queries for yet."

The best example of this is exclusive news or other original breaking information, he explained.

"The people that break that news are gonna have a disproportionate advantage over the rest," Rauch said. Other types of content will already have been ingested by AIs, so that will be a lot less valuable, he added.

A new level of speed

Vercel helps developers build the user-facing parts of web applications, so the startup has deep experience with online content and publishing.

Rauch sees speed as another crucial part of surviving in the era of AI-powered content distribution.

"AIs still need to aggregate, summarize, consume, index," so getting exclusive information online as quickly as possible is key here, he explained.

Rauch shared a recent example where he was looking online for information about Nvidia's quarterly results right when the chip giant was releasing its financials.

"I saw that MarketWatch had this real-time thing, where it almost seemed like the journalist was typing as I was consuming the page," Rauch said. "I'm very much attracted to that as a consumer, and that's why I actually didn't get an AI overview for that answer."

Moving away from SEO

Rauch also sees a move away from Search Engine Optimization, where website owners obsess about how they rank in Google Search results.

AI models and chatbots will form their own "opinion" on topics and this will be based heavily on the frontier content that's been used to ground these AIs, he explained.

"Instead of just purely focusing on where you rank in terms of blue links, you have to shift to where you stand in terms of the frontier content that the AI has ingested that, therefore, forms its opinion," Rauch said.

He describes this as "monitoring what's in the mind of the AI."

"We haven't been confronted with this reality yet. It hasn't really fully sunk in for people," he added.

Unique perspectives and experiences

When AIs know almost all the facts already, unique human perspectives and experiences will become more valuable, Rauch also predicted.

A description of a new piece of software will likely be handled by AI, but a developer's own experience using this software will stand out.

"This is my experience with this piece of software; no one can deny that. Right? And this is not something that will be so subject to summarization by the AI," Rauch said. "Actual opinions are going to be worth more."