Birthday Week 2023 edition. AI, connectivity cloud, and so much more

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we kick things off with an intro directly from the balcony of our Lisbon office. Then, we dive into the week packed with announcements, tools, and products from Cloudflare’s Birthday Week, where we aim to give back to the Internet.

On Monday, our 13th birthday brought us important sustainability stats (you can cut your network carbon emissions by up to 96% ), and we highlighted the significance of dynamically routing traffic across the globe , along with the introduction of Incident Alerts .

Tuesday was all about explaining how Cloudflare functions as a connectivity cloud , providing a modern way to connect and protect your clouds, networks, applications, and users. There’s also mention to the Amazon’s $2bn IPv4 tax — and how you can avoid paying it.

Wednesday was AI day, featuring the launch of Workers AI (serverless GPU-powered inference on Cloudflare’s global network), Vectorize (a vector database for shipping AI-powered applications to production, fast), AI Gateway (making AI applications more observable, reliable, and scalable), and the use of WebGPU in Cloudflare Workers. We also announced a slew of AI-related partnerships , and the annual Founders’ Letter comes with an AI poem (from a model running on Workers AI).

Thursday put the spotlight on databases and a partnership with Microsoft to power their Edge Secure Network . We delved into topics like Hyperdrive (making databases feel global), new Workers pricing (never pay to wait on I/O again), and the arrival of the D1 open beta .

Finally, Friday revolved around privacy and security. We made Post Quantum Cryptography generally available (to safeguard against quantum computers) and introduced Cloudflare Email Retro Scan to tackle email threats lurking in your Office 365. Other highlights included our ability to detect zero-days before they become an issue, and the fact that Cloudflare is now free of CAPTCHAs (Turnstile is free for everyone).

Check our Birthday Week 2023 Hub to see all the blog posts and related Cloudflare TV segments.