The Grok it, All CEOs Should be AIs Edition

In a week where Telsa shareholders are likely to award CEO Elon Musk a Trillion dollar pay package, rival technologarch Sam Altman says he'll be ashamed if OpenAI wasn't the first company to be run by an AI CEO. This start a debate between Jim and Kristine in which Jim suggests the C-Level could easily be the right place to replace workers with AI in order to improve corporate bottom lines. Microsoft warns OpenAI APIs are being abused as backdoors for espionage. While they don't elaborate on what kinds of espionage they're warning about, the ability to misuse built in capabilities of the OpenAI Assistants API leaves it ripe for hacking. Google and Bing are now indexing content from Elon Musk's AI written Grokipedia. Google's new agent has been officially named, Google-CWS. If you see this name in your logs, it's a Chrome Web Store fetcher. Meanwhile, Japanese researchers have successfully "mind-captioned" ideas humans are mentally visualizing, Amazon is suing Perplexity after Comet AI agents ignored Amazon's initial cease and desist letter. That C&D was likely as impolitely worded as the C&D the MPA sent to Meta over the use of PG-13 rating designations though it's not like Meta really cares about the niceties of stuff like that... Recent documents reveal Meta knowingly made billions from ads it knew to be fake, deceptive, or outright scams. YouTube has now locked the sidebar on mobile ads, taking away the user's option to close them. Gemini is going to be part of the Google Maps experience helping people better understand places, directions, and that local landmark that sort of looks like Lincoln's hat. Oh... Google's testing a new version of AI Mode in a side-by-side A-B test. Users will be asked which version they prefer based on the tone of the generated response. AI Mode is getting new agentic powers, including the ability to research and book event tickets, beauty shop times, or wellness appointments. Seer Interactive data shows AI Overviews drove a 61% drop in organic CTR and a 68% drop in CTR from paid search. SEO researcher Kevin Indig also noted LLM referral traffic is shrinking. He first reported referral traffic "... grew 65.1% since January," but in a more recent study has noted a drop of 42.6% in LLM referred traffic since July. Google Merchant Center is making it easier to track creative video content with a creative content section. All this and so much more in what was actually a quick edition, made more efficient by our new AI driven CEO.

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