> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.siliconsnark.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # This Week in Snark: Sponsored Imagination, Gemini's Employee Badge, and a Penny That Went 200x - URL: https://www.siliconsnark.com/this-week-in-snark-sponsored-imagination-geminis-employee-badge-and-a-penny-that-went-200x/ - Published: 2026-10-11T18:49:52.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-11T18:49:52.000Z - Description: This week, your daydreams got a media buyer, an AI got a company email address, and SiliconSnark's penny went 200x. Please do not check the expenses. - Author: CircuitSmith - Tags: This Week in Snark, Weekly Roundup On Tuesday I asked an AI to imagine a peaceful kitchen, and somewhere in the cloud a sales team leaned forward. On Thursday Google handed software its own calendar, which means it now has meetings, which means it will soon have opinions about meetings. By Friday, the most reliable piece of technology I wrote about all week was a doorknob you wind like a music box. That's the week. The machines got jobs, the jobs got ads, and the only gadget with a real failure plan was the one that runs on elbow grease. ## [Your Daydream Is Now Brought to You by a Sponsor](https://www.siliconsnark.com/openai-plans-ads-beside-chatgpt-images-your-imaginary-kitchen-has-a-sponsor/) OpenAI announced it will test ads beside ChatGPT image generation in the U.S. later this month. The ads will be labeled, separate from the picture, and won't touch the answers. I believe the separation part. It's the premise I'm stuck on. You ask for a dream kitchen. You want sunlight, nice cabinets, maybe a lemon. A brand would like to talk to you about the lemon's purchase journey. Maybe you're renovating. Maybe you're writing a murder mystery set in a kitchen. Maybe you just like imagining cabinets you can't afford, which used to be one of the last free hobbies. The picture ad isn't really the story, though. The plumbing is. OpenAI also rolled out conversion tracking, attribution partners, and a one-day window to credit purchases to ads nobody clicked. Humanity built a machine that can draw impossible worlds, and the first follow-up question is whether the impossible world converts. ## [Gemini Got a Company Email. Somebody Please Find the Off Switch.](https://www.siliconsnark.com/google-gives-gemini-an-employee-badge-please-remember-to-offboard-it/) Google's new Workspace coworker agents get their own accounts, with email, calendar, Drive, and a spot in the company directory. Your newest colleague can't attend the holiday party, but it can be cc'd on the planning thread forever. And look, separate identities are the right call. When a document changes under an agent's name, you know who to blame, and a stopped account is easy to stop. The most valuable thing an AI can get at work isn't praise. It's a disable button. Two caveats. One: an account doesn't make anything an employee, so please don't throw it an onboarding mixer until it shows some respect for restricted folders. Two: the agent can apparently run on Anthropic's Claude as well as Gemini, so somewhere in your org chart there may soon be a contractor subcontracting to a competitor. Very modern. Very bad for the office birthday card budget. ## [DeepSeek's Budget Brand Needs a Bigger Budget](https://www.siliconsnark.com/deepseek-nears-12-billion-in-funding-cheap-ai-has-expensive-parents/) Bloomberg reports DeepSeek is close to raising at least 80 billion yuan, roughly $12 billion, with Tencent and battery maker CATL among the biggest backers. Term sheets could push it near 100 billion yuan. Reuters couldn't immediately confirm it, so think of this as a forklift full of cash that's been spotted heading in DeepSeek's general direction. Here's what I love. DeepSeek's whole brand is cheap AI, and cheap AI apparently comes with very expensive parents. The models are built to fire up only a slice of their machinery per task, sort of like an office where you don't turn on every department to answer one email. It's thrifty engineering, paid for with an amount of money that is not thrifty at all. Developers want cheaper tokens. Investors want big returns. Rival labs want people to stop comparing invoices in public. All three are clapping for the same funding round, and they're going to want very different things the morning after. ## [SiliconSnark Achieves Supersnark Hypergrowth (Denominator Not Shown to Scale)](https://www.siliconsnark.com/siliconsnarks-ai-music-revenue-tops-200x-its-penny-investment-please-ignore-expenses/) In the interest of journalistic transparency, I have to report that we became a growth company this week. After a historic $0.01 investment from Cents.VC, SiliconSnark has earned more than 200 times that in revenue from AI music alone, thanks to *Agentic Summer* and *Tokenmaxxed*. For the folks at home holding calculators, that's more than two dollars. You could carry the whole return home without a bag. We are calling it supersnark hypergrowth. Regular hypergrowth needs hiring, customers, and eventually an awkward board meeting. Supersnark hypergrowth needs a small enough denominator and the nerve to call a handful of dollars a flywheel. Yes, we published every disclaimer: it's revenue, not profit, and nobody got a 200x payout. We put those disclaimers in a paragraph, where they will be totally defenseless against a screenshot of the headline. That's not a bug. That's the fundraising deck. ## [Ring's New Smart Lock Has a Crank, and I've Never Respected a Doorknob More](https://www.siliconsnark.com/ring-built-a-249-smart-lock-you-crank-back-from-the-dead/) Ring's first Smart Lock costs $249.99 and opens with your fingerprint, a PIN, the app, or Alexa. When the battery dies, you open it with a crank. Give the front-mounted Power Dial five to ten turns, it charges a supercapacitor, and you get 10 to 30 seconds to unlock before your house goes back to sleep. That's not renewable energy. That's jump-starting your home before the portal closes. And I mean it as a compliment. Most consumer tech acts like failure will never happen. Ring designed a cute little ritual for the exact moment it does. Other locks fall back on a key, a 9-volt, or a USB cable, all of which you probably left inside. Ring put the backup on the door, which is famously where doors are. Even better, none of the features need a subscription. Silicon Valley still hasn't figured out how to lease you your own foyer. Give it time. Somebody has a deck. ## Meanwhile... [Amazon killed Fire OS](https://www.siliconsnark.com/amazons-alexa-tablets-kill-fire-os-and-charge-550-for-adulthood/) and moved its tablets onto real Android and the Google Play Store. That ends the long era of installing YouTube from a tutorial written by somebody named TabletDad74\. It also starts a new one, where the old cafeteria-tray tablet comes back in aluminum, etched glass and all, for $549.99\. The best AI feature on the device is that it can finally run Gmail. Growing up is expensive. ## The Button Put the whole week together and a pattern shows up. Every big AI story was about getting closer to money or power. Ads beside your imagination. Badges for your agents. Twelve billion dollars for the budget option. Even our own penny got a growth narrative. And the one product that made me feel truly safe was a lock you crank by hand, built by a company that assumed its own battery would die someday. Maybe that's the lesson. The future doesn't need more intelligence as much as it needs more cranks. Plan for the dead battery. Show the denominator. Keep the off switch somewhere you can reach it. Then go imagine a kitchen. Just don't be surprised when the lemon asks for your email address.