Are we cooked and other questions

There is a gap between adoption and impact. AI is disrupting discovery more than it’s increasing sales. LLM traffic accounts for less than 1% of reservations across Booking Holding’s sites (booking.com, kayak.com, etc). Bit of a mish-mash of an article, not much data on the lack of impact on sales, but some interesting nuggets regardless.

They turned the answers into a book, “Are We Cooked?” It looks kind of good.

Time.com has an alternate layer that exists to serve sponsored content and ads exclusively to AI bots. No humans ever see this layer of the website. The objective is to shape what AI agents say about brands. The initiative was developed by Time and Mobian, an adtech company. This raises transparency issues, as audiences would see content that was shaped by paid ads.

“Marketing departments are reorganizing to look less like creative agencies and more like software teams, complete with sprints, version control, modular asset libraries, and a governed layer of AI agents. Job postings for GTM engineering roles grew 205 percent between 2024 and 2025, according to an analysis of more than 1,000 listings by Bloomberry, with a median salary of $127,500 and companies like Vercel and OpenAI paying above $250,000.”

The Anthropic Economic Index is a connector that you can turn on, and it gives you access to information about how people and companies are using Claude around the country. Interesting resource.

A non-mathy Anthropic employee had Claude try to solve a notorious math problem, the Riemann hypothesis. Claude expressed doubt about the feasibility of solving it, but Jarred Sumner kept telling it to believe in itself, which is the only reason Claude continued cracking away. Claude did not solve the problem, but it made a significant leap forward in solving it. Not clear if “keep trying” would have had the same result vs the more woo-woo “have faith in yourself” prompts Sumner sent.

Blenders eyewear has hired “Jordan The Stallion” to be its first Chief Creator Officer. Edelman made the same move 2 weeks earlier. Audiences want to engage with humans, not brands. Eyeballs and budgets are increasingly moving away from paid and TV, into the streams. YouTube now sucks up more view-time than Netflix. Algorithms and the ability to consistently drive responses from followers are the holy grails.

Anton Pirisi will have a dedicated creative team to create content specifically for that platform. Whoa.

“Fewer influencers can afford to stay in, and fewer civilians are awaiting their influence. Some 55% of Americans post less to social media than they did five years ago, and 51% describe maintaining a social presence as something that “feels like work,” according to a 2026 Incogni survey of US adults. Time spent on Instagram is still climbing, but Meta’s own data reveals why: the algorithm is force-feeding short video into the feed. Engagement is rising because the machine is shoveling shit harder than before.”

You love to see it!

25-50% of the traffic on OpenRouter and Vercel is open-weight models and 80% of startups use them. Moonshot AI’s latest model, Kimi K3, is “the first open-weight model to crack the frontier to this extent,” scoring better than Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol in some metrics. The performance gap between frontier and open-weight used to be years, now it’s months.

“The announcement comes a day after a Florida-based pastor sued the company for giving a near-fatal suggestion not to consult a doctor.” I recommend not sharing health data with OpenAI or Anthropic.

If you’re using AI to build the same stuff, you are not getting the most out of it.

The platform is seeing significant growth as creative professionals realize that trying to game opaque algorithms on LinkedIn and Instagram is not a fun way to spend time.