Snapchat announced on Tuesday that it’s rolling out “AI Sponsored Snaps,” which will allow users to interact directly with brands’ AI agents. Sponsored Snaps are the ads placed directly into the app’s main Chat tab. Until now, users couldn’t interact with these ads, but with the launch of AI Sponsored Ads, they’ll be able to do things like ask questions and get recommendations.

Of course, not everyone will be on board with AI-sponsored ads, as they introduce AI into yet another part of the Snapchat experience. Plus, not everyone is eager for more advanced advertising.

However, Snapchat said in a blog post that its “community isn’t just open to AI in conversation, they’re already embracing it,” given that over half a billion users have messaged its AI chatbot since it launched in 2023.

“Conversation is becoming the most valuable real estate in advertising,” said Ajit Mohan, Chief Business Officer at Snap, in the blog post. “AI is accelerating that shift, turning chat into the place where people discover products, ask questions, and make decisions in real time. The real opportunity isn’t just putting ads into those environments, it’s designing formats that feel native to how people already talk.”

For brands, the new AI Sponsored Snaps give them access to Snapchat’s nearly one billion monthly active users. They can bring their own AI agents onto the platform to drive engagement and purchases.

Snapchat says the new format builds on the momentum of Sponsored Snaps, which already drive 22% more conversions with nearly 20% lower cost per action. With the new format, they can engage users through personalized, AI-powered interactions right where they’re already having conversations.

The company says 85% of users engage regularly in the Chat feed, and that users sent over 950 billion chats in Q1 2026 alone. Additionally, 57% of teen Snapchat users message others daily, including 4 in 10 who do so several times a day.

Amazon’s podcasting business has transformed over the past six months, according to The New York Times.

Back in August 2025, the company reportedly eliminated more than 100 jobs from its podcast studio Wondery. At the time, Amazon insisted it was not shutting Wondery down, and that appears to be technically true — it still uses the Wondery brand.

But the NYT said Amazon “took a sledgehammer” to the studio. Audio-only podcasts now operate under Audible, while a new department called Creator Services works with on-camera celebrities like Dax Shepard, Keke Palmer, and Jason and Travis Kelce.

For example, the company said it’s creating an “expanding universe” around the Kelce brothers’ “New Heights,” with monetization plans that go far beyond standard podcast ads. There’s a new section on Amazon called Kelce Clubhouse, where fans can buy “New Heights” merchandise, watch the documentary “Kelce,” and purchase recommended products for a football-watching party.

In the words of Creator Services general manager Matt Sandler, Amazon is trying to “infuse both the content and the commerce together.”

Of course, other online creators are also betting on commerce. But according to the NYT, Amazon is the only one that “dismembered a company” to get here.

Theo Baker is graduating from Stanford this spring with something most seniors don’t have: a book deal, a George Polk Award that he received for his investigative reporting as a student journalist, and a front-row account of one of the most romanticized institutions in the world.

His forthcoming “How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University” was excerpted Friday in The Atlantic and based on that alone, I can’t wait to see the rest. The only question worth asking is the same one Baker might be too close to answer: Can a book like this actually change anything? Or does the spotlight, as it always seems to, send more students racing to the place?

The parallel that keeps coming to my mind is “The Social Network.” Aaron Sorkin wrote a film that was an indictment in many ways of the particular sociopathy that Silicon Valley tends to reward. What it seemingly did was make a generation of young people want to be Mark Zuckerberg. The cautionary tale became a recruitment video. The story of the guy who — in the movie, at least — steamrolled his best friend on his way to billions didn’t discourage ambition; it further glamorized it.

Judging by the excerpt, Baker’s portrait of Stanford is far more granular. He talks with hundreds of people to roundly describe the “Stanford inside Stanford.” “You sort of join it freshman year or you don’t,” one student tells Baker. It’s an invite-only world where venture capitalists wine and dine 18-year-olds, where “pre-idea funding” worth hundreds of thousands of dollars gets handed to students before they’ve had an original concept, and where the boundary between mentorship and predation is nearly impossible to discern. (The shame of chasing teenage founders, if it ever existed, is gone; not chasing them is no longer an option for most VCs.) Steve Blank, who teaches the school’s legendary startup course, tells Baker that “Stanford is an incubator with dorms,” which is not meant as a compliment.

What’s new isn’t that this pressure exists but that it has been fully internalized. There was a time, maybe 10, maybe 15 years ago, when Stanford students felt the weight of Silicon Valley expectation pressing down on them from outside. Now, many of them arrive on campus already expecting, as a matter of course, to launch a startup, to raise money, to become rich.

I think about a friend — I’ll call him D — who dropped out of Stanford a few years ago, partway through his first two years, to launch a startup. He was barely past his teens. The words “I’m thinking of taking a leave of absence” had just escaped his mouth before the university, by his own account, gave him its cheerful blessing to dive full bore into the startup. Stanford doesn’t fight this anymore, if it ever did. Departures like his are an expected outcome.

D is now in his mid-twenties. His company has raised what would register in any normal context as an astonishing amount of money. He almost certainly knows more about cap tables, venture dynamics, and product-market fit than most people learn in a decade of conventional careers. By every metric the Valley uses, he’s a success story. But he also doesn’t see his family (no time), has barely dated (no time), and the company, which keeps growing, doesn’t seem inclined to provide him with that kind of balance anytime soon. He is already, in some meaningful sense, behind on his own life.

This is the part that Baker’s excerpt hints at without fully landing on, maybe because he’s still inside it himself. The costs of this system aren’t just distributed in the form of fraud — though Baker is direct about this, describing it as pervasive and largely consequence-free. The costs are also more personal: the relationships not formed, the ordinary milestones of early adulthood traded away in exchange for a billion-dollar vision that, statistically, almost certainly won’t materialize. Blank tells Baker, “100% of entrepreneurs think they’re visionaries. The data say 99% aren’t.”

What happens to the 99% at age 30? At age 40? These aren’t questions Silicon Valley is set up to answer, and they’re certainly not questions Stanford is about to start asking.

Baker also surfaces something that Sam Altman articulates best. Altman — OpenAI CEO, former Y Combinator head, precisely the kind of person these students aspire to become — tells Baker that the VC dinner circuit has become an “anti-signal” to the people who actually know what talent looks like. The students doing the rounds, performing founder-ness for rooms full of investors, tend not to be the real builders. The real builders, presumably, are somewhere else, building things. The performance of ambition and the thing itself are increasingly hard to tell apart, and the system that was ostensibly designed to find genius has gotten very good at finding people who are good at seeming like geniuses.

“How to Rule the World” sounds like exactly the right book for this moment in time. But there’s a certain irony in the strong likelihood that this critically minded book about Stanford’s relationship to power and money will be celebrated by the same class of people it critiques, and — if it does well (it has already been optioned for a movie) — used as further evidence that Stanford produces not just founders and fraudsters but important writers and journalists, too.