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Some people love watching the Super Bowl for the game. Others love it for the commercials. If youre in the latter group, youll probably have noticed that the ad spots in between commercial breaks during Super Bowl LX last night were dominated by one big theme: artificial intelligence. As noted by AdWeek, the television advertising analytics firm iSpot found that nearly a quarter of all commercials during the 2026 Super Bowl featured AI in some way. To be more precise, 15 out of the 66 commercialsor 23% of themeither used AI in their creation (like the entirely AI-generated ad from the vodka maker SVEDKA) or were spots by big tech companies directly advertising their AI services. It’s the spots by those big tech companies that show how the race to capture the attention of non-techie consumers has heated up. Most of the big tech companies that advertised their AI during the Super Bowl last night have spent hundreds of billions combined building out their AI systems. Now they want to make sure their user numbers grow big enough to justify their capital expenditures. Here’s a list of tech companies that ran AI-related spots last night: Amazon The fun spot stars a paranoid Chris Hemsworth who distrusts the companys new Alexa+ AI assistant. Genspark The AI workplace assistant startups ad starred Mathew Broderick and is notable because its script was actually generated by the Genspark AI platform, notes iSpot. Google The search giants ad takes the heartwarming route, with a mother using Gemini to generate images of a familys new house in order to make her child feel better about the move. Meta/Oakley The ad, directed by Spike Lee, showcases the comapnies AI smart glasses. Microsoft The Redmond companys ad is all about a coach using Microsoft Copilot in Excel to find the best linebackers. It should be noted that while this ad ran during the Super Bowl, it aired online several weeks earlier. OpenAI The ChatGPT makers ad focuses on its new Codex software development tools.
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Telehealth company Hims & Hers dropped its plan to offer a knockoff version of the weight-loss pill Wegovy on Saturday two days after it announced the new drug and one day after the Food and Drug Administration threatened to restrict access to the ingredients needed to copy popular weight-loss medications.Hims had said Thursday that it would offer a compounded version of the new Wegovy pill that drugmaker Novo Nordisk just began selling last month. Novo immediately threatened to sue Hims, and then the FDA said Friday that it plans to take decisive steps to limit access to the active ingredients in popular GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy, Ozempic and Zepbound.Hims’ own website still touted the new semaglutide pill offering Saturday afternoon hours after it announced on X that it will no longer sell the medicine. Semaglutide is the chemical name for Wegovy.“Since launching the compounded semaglutide pill on our platform, we’ve had constructive conversations with stakeholders across the industry. As a result, we have decided to stop offering access to this treatment,” Hims said in its statement. “We remain committed to the millions of Americans who depend on us for access to safe, affordable, and personalized care.”Hims didn’t say Saturday whether it will make any changes to the compounded versions of injectable weight-loss medications it has been selling as a result of the FDA action.The San Francisco-based company had planned to significantly undercut Novo’s price of $149 per month for the Wegovy pill by selling its version at $49 for the first month and $99 per month thereafter. Hims and other similar companies got started several years ago by offering cheap generic versions of drugs for hair loss, erectile dysfunction and other health issues before branching out into the multibillion market for obesity medications.Novo plans to tout its new FDA-approved Wegovy pill in a celebrity-filled Super Bowl ad on Sunday. The Danish pharmaceutical giant didn’t immediately comment Saturday on Hims’ decision to drop the knockoff. Rival drugmaker Eli Lilly has said that it expects the FDA to approve an oral version of its orforglipron weight loss medication later this spring. But Wegovy is the first pill to hit the market.The compounded medicine that Hims had planned to sell wasn’t approved and had not gone through trials to demonstrate that it would be effective.The FDA permits specialty pharmacies and other companies to make compounded versions of brand name drugs when they are in short supply. And the booming demand for GLP-1 drugs in recent years prompted companies like Hims to jump into the multibillion-dollar market for the drugs, with many patients willing to pay cash.In 2024, the FDA said that GLP-1 drugs were no longer in a shortage, which was expected to put an end to the compounding. But companies like Hims relied on an exception to keep selling their versions of the medications because the practice is still permitted when a prescription is customized for the patient. Josh Funk, AP Business Writer
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E-Commerce
I hold the key to the Ferrari in my hand. I press it, like a puzzle piece, into a notch by my right hip. Yellow fades from the key as the hue enters the shifter and the dashboard comes to life with a wave of yellow. Im enchanted. My foot cant wait to slam down on the pedal. The only thing Im missing is . . . the entire rest of the car. Even for a legendary automaker launching its first EV, it was a preposterous pitch: Ferraris big car reveal would not show the car. And it wouldnt show the cars interior, either. Instead, journalists were asked to flysome of them halfway across the worldto scope out a steering wheel, a few chunks of dashboard, a center console, and a seat. I can count the designers Id do that for, not on one hand, but on one finger. As it happens, that was the designer pointing the way. While the world will never get a ride in Jony Ives long-lost Apple Car, they will get a spiritual sequel with a 1,000+ horsepower upgrade, Jony Ives spin on Ferrari. [Photo: Ferrari] Ferrari meets Silicon Valley Designed over the last five years with the firm LoveFrom, the Ferrari Luce (translation: “light” or “illumination”) is a generationally important car for the Italian automaker as it transitions to an electric future. Everything from the cars form, to its layout, to its buttons, to an e-ink key that’s the size and shape of a Zippo lighter, to the vehicles interface and typeface, was designed through the gaze of the San Francisco firm. It’s nearly impossible to ignore the Venn diagram between Ferraris first electric vehicle and the golden era of Apple products. And you certainly dont need to squint to spot some of Ives favorite materials, like the prominent use of anodized aluminum and Gorilla Glass across the components. [Photo: Ferrari] But this outcome seems largely by Italy’s own design. Ferraris CEO, Benedetto Vigna, spent two decades on semiconductors before turning to Italian supercars in 2021. He wants to carve a future for Ferrari in a rapidly changing world, and also crack the code to court new customers, like Silicon Valley billionaires, to spend some of their fortune on cars. The projectto be fully revealed later this year before shipping in Octoberwas led by the aforementioned Ive and Marc Newson. Before co-founding LoveFrom, they were best friends for decades, and collaborators on projects ranging from a 1.5-ton desk auctioned for charity to the Apple Watch. Ive, of course, defined the modern era by designing products ranging from the iMac to the iPhone. While Newson, a lesser-known name in Apple history, is a star in his own rite. Hes also an almost archetypal designer to reimagine a luxury automaker. Long before he posted his own exploits racing vintage cars on his Instagram, he crafted just about every object imaginable (including a public bathroom for Japan, Nikes built for space, and the influential Ford 021C), with a particular penchant for high-end brands. His Lockheed Lounge is still the most expensive piece of furniture ever sold by a living designer. (Get a deep look into his career and design process here.) Backing the two of them, of course, are the industrial, UX, mechanical, and graphic design experts at LoveFrommany of whom worked with Ive during his days at Apple. Ive, as it turns out, had good reason for extending the hype cycle for LoveFroms first major client outside of Apple. If they showed the body of the Luce now, its all anyone would notice. Meanwhile, LoveFrom has been working for years on dozens of components inside the car, each of which they treated as beloved products all their own. Ferraris chief design officer, Flavio Manzoni, frames the Luce as something of a capsule project thats independent from Ferraris full lineup, which offered LoveFrom license to create a thesis that can live self-contained. This is very inspiring, and certainly will influence everything [we do], says Manzoni. But it also must be kept as something really singular and unique. Everything has been done interpreting the soul of a very special car. The Ferrari Luce seat. [Photo: Ferrari] Deconstructed and organized atop white tables during the preview, I could appreciate not only the Luces components like its wheel, but its subcomponents of knobs, switches, and paddlesperhaps a dozen different buttons each offering their own feeling. With nested, CNCd aluminum housings, you can almost see a watch, or a game controller, or just some irresistibly interesting thingamabob living harmoniously inside another. The vehicle is an ecosystem of mini gadgets. Pulse-rocketing supercars couldnt be more disparate from te ever-serene atmosphere inside LoveFroms San Francisco studio, where fresh cut flowers casually adorn each nook. As I sit with Ive and Newson at a long white table, upon soft blue, yellow, and orange stools mirrored by their Moncler collection at the far end of the room, the duo conjures a whole other thought space, riffing on their high-octane handiwork. We really wanted every part, every component, to be designed as an individual product. So it’s like dozens and dozens of cameras and watches. The idea [was] we could spend the time and invest the care on every part and have it work, says Ive. Even the forms are very self-contained and modular. The components, as it turned out, are worth talking about. As the auto industry inevitably transitions to electric, LoveFroms design team created a love letter to tactile interface, offering solutions to blending digital and physical experiences in the vehicle, and teasing the sort of auteur-driven work thats disappeared in an increasingly blanded and averaged automotive industry that sold its soul chasing Tesla. We’re very aware that we love the sounds of our big old Ferrari engines, says Ive. And so rather than trying to figure out some sort of surrogate or something inauthentic to [compensate], we worked so hard to try and create as visceral and direct connection with the object [as possible]. [Photo: Ferrari] Focusing the drivers experience A Ferrari is a drivers car, and without looking around at any other spectacle in the Luce, the driver experience has been designed for focus. It begins with the car’s seats, which seem plucked from somewhere between a race car and a living room. After sinking into them, drivers place their key into the console, and they take the wheel. [Image: Ferrari] Most wheels tilt up and down independently from the cars instrument panel, making it sometimes difficult to be comfortable while having a clear line of sight through the wheel to your gauges. But the Luce moves this entire rig as one unified gesture: The wheel, steering column, and instrument panel shift as one. (What I hear was a particular engineering challenge for both safety and mitigating vibration.) The wheel feels like a natural conclusion to Ferraris last few generations of fussing with its own icon. The manufacturer added controversial touch capabilities in 2019, before reversing course last year with a modernized, more mechanical option that can be retrofitted into older vehicles. LoveFrom designed the Ferrari Luce steering wheel with an aluminum core. [Photo: Ferrari] The LoveFrom wheel reads rounder all around, veering more toward vintage Ferrari than an oblong reference to F1. Its aluminum core is earnestly exposed rather than obfuscated in leathers and rubber. The controls gently reorganize Ferrari mainstays, like the bold red Manettino dial (to adjust your driving mode), into something you feel like your brain can process alongside new touches like left and right buttons (theyre turn signals). [Photo: Ferrari] The instrument panelor binnacleis not just a wide screen with widgety virtual controls: its a collection of four screens. Three round screens, making up the speedometer and other dials, live recessed inside a fourth screen. Lenses and parallax effects give the panels additional depth and physicality. But that physicality is more than an illusion of pixels and refraction: the speedometer needle is real. [Image: Ferrari] The combined effect will be something drivers haven’t exactly seen or felt before, punctuated by a pared back interface that tells most of the story through the three hues of the Tricolorewithout it feeling like a trip through our grocery stores international aisle. [Photo: Ferrari] Chris Wilson, who you know for his work on the Apple Watch UI, worked with Ferrari engineers to marry onscreen UX with its new torque shifting technology. While electric motors require no shifting, pulling the paddle on the left side of the wheel provides a virtual downshift (turning the dial green while motors slow the car to recoup energy). When its time for an extra jolt of power, the interface blinks red, and you pull the paddle on the right. LF Maranello, the Ferrari Luce’s custom typeface. [Image: courtesy LoveFrom] Meanwhile, the numbers you see on the instrument panel are part of a new typeface family called LF Maranello designed by LoveFroms Antonio Cavedoni, who worked alongside Wilson on Apples San Francisco typeface before making LoveFroms own. Bucking the wide stance letters Ferrari is known for, the clean sans serif is an amalgamation of midcentury Ferrari engine stamping, the numbers on old Ferrari dials (themselves often plucked from whatever watch manufactures were already using), and local signage from Ferraris hometown of Maranello. With the slightest expressive indulgencesa curvy flag on the 1, a short stem on the 4it manages to look vintage and contemporary at the same time. The hardware is geometrically perfect, says Cavedoni. But here, we can do anything. Fixing human factors at high speeds Over two days of previews, Ive doesnt mince words about the influential approach Tesla has taken, in which, through some desperate attempt to create sci-fi mystery, the vehicles mask the simplest functions. One such example is the way a Tesla handles its gaspers (thats the technical term for the fans built into the dash). Whereas Tesla literally hides them so well you can only control them via a screen, LoveFroms gaspers almost glow. The Ferrari Luce’s tablet is a departure from typical EV design.[Photo: Ferrari] With spherical aluminum bodies, they could double as Macbook satellite speakers. You twist a ring, and a visible, central flap swings open or closes with a satisfying click. You dont need to dig through a UI, or even squint to look for an X symbol on some dial on the dash. The object explains itself. Clarity is so important. Not only in terms of physical interaction, but intellectual clarity, says Newson. Since Elon Musk stuck what Ive calls an iPad into the center of a Tesla, a disjointed center screen has increasingly taxed the experience of driving. Its why I was perhaps the most and least surprised by LoveFroms choice to have a tablet in the center of the vehicle. [Image: Ferrari] However, Luces tablet is foundationally different. Its entirely unnecessary for driving, and, perhaps ironically, a screen thats usable without looking at it. The tablet sits atop a large aluminum handle, which allows you to tilt the screen or blindedly rest your palm for a point of reference. That handle also adds impact protection from a series of aluminum toggle switches that live in the bottom of the display, managing tasks like climate control and seat warming. Yes, these switches appear straight out of midcentury Ferrari design language. And yes, LoveFrom produced four thick books charting the history of Ferrari gifted to the company at the start of their collaboration. But the team bristles when I characterize the choice for toggle switches as an homage. The Luce’s tablet includes physical controls. [Photo: Ferrari] Newson points out the toggle itself is a known typology, because its the best tool for the job. Thats why its in the Luce and all sorts of vintage control panels, he notesand thats also why we innately think toggles are so cool. If you look at helicopters from the 50s, 60s, they weren’t screwed up with design, says Ive. Their beauty was a function of them being so brilliantly utilitarian. And I think so often stuff just gets ugly when design gets in the way. Setting the stage for performance But thats not to say the Luce is some unflinching commitment to minimalism, or that a serious commitment to craft requires the driver to never crack a smile. In the upper right hand corner of that tablet is a multigraph. At a glance, it looks like a clock with physical minute and hour hands that could be straight out of a fine timepiece. But a split second later, it can turn into a compass or one of two stopwatches (in 60-second, and 5-secod launch variants). Unlike typical timepieces, the hands will spin independently from one another, animating in an unexpected way. [Photo: Ferrari] Is this touch purely about function? Ha! Of course nota virtual clock could appear on the screen in the same spot. Its LoveFrom stunting, taking its own metaphorical Ferrari out of the garage and bringing fans along for the ride. [Image: courtesy LoveFrom] We’re introducing an impedimentan engineering challenge, but it makes it way more engaging, says Ive, before holding his own iPhone into the air looking like an Uber driver scanning for their next ride. Or it could just be [that] mounted. We see a similar celebration of driver engagement with Luces launch control. This is a setting that preps the car, the battery, and the driver to coax the maximum straight-line power for acceleration. Instead of pressing a button on the wheel, this new launch control requires the driver to hold the brake while reaching above their head and pull on a cylindrical, pneumatic handle. After a few seconds, Im told, the cars entire cabin lights up orange, enlisting everyone into the vehicle to hold on with dramatic flare. [Photo: Ferrari] Back in LoveFrom’s studio, Ive and Newson deconstruct their code-orange approach. The Ferrari brand is extremely visceral. And in some ways there’s a theatricality you really need to embrace, says Newson. So things like the launch control, things like the key ceremonythere’s a nice, humor is the wrong word …It’s tough to figure out the word for the yellow of the key translating into the carI mean, it’s sort of funny, chuckles Ive. It’s funjoyful. It needs to be,” says Newson. “No one needs a Ferrari, sorry to say, but you own a Ferrari, because it will just be a much more fun way of [driving].” We love that there was such a focus on being fun and joyful to drive, and it’s like, no apology, says Ive.
Category:
E-Commerce
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