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First Major Site to Run by A.I.

Plentyoffish, a site with over 400 million page views a month, considered to be one of the largest websites in the world today, is almost exclusively run by an Artificial Intelligence. In 2004 Plentyoffish was growing in leaps and bounds and CEO and sole employee Markus Frind had a decision to make: hiring hundreds of employees and converting to a paid service like all his competitors, or developing an AI to run the site. Having grown exponentially since its conception in March 2003 Plentyoffish is now the only major website run by an AI and a single human. Plentyoffish is the only dating site with 400 million or more monthly page views that has less then 200 employees.

"It was an impossible technical challenge and one that I couldn`t pass up," says Frind. Today, the site`s AI does the same job that 200 to 600 employees do for other sites. "It is really amazing, you wake up in the morning and think wow I can`t believe I created that," remarks Frind.

The site is continuing its growth at a torrid pace. The online dating site is exceptionally strong in Canada where, according to stats, more than 1.2% of the population aged 20 to 24 and 8% of the population aged 25 to 44 use Plentyoffish on a daily basis. In the United States Plentyoffish is still not the dominate player but it has gone from nowhere to 5th position, in less than a year. "Given our current 10% monthly growth rate we expect to be the dominate dating service in the United States in under 1 year," Frind says.