BIG TECH

AI Super Bowl ads missed the mark

In between the Seahawks demolishing the Patriots and Bad Bunny climbing a telephone pole in his dynamic and elaborate halftime show performance, tech companies got plenty of airtime on Super Bowl Sunday. 

Some of AI’s biggest names touted their models and products in ads in Super Bowl LX, including Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Meta and, of course, AI’s biggest rivalry: Anthropic and OpenAI. Viewers generally reacted badly to the AI ads, which scored very low for attention, likeability and watchability.

Here’s a rundown of what we caught: 

• As shown last week, Anthropic decided to use two ad slots to malign the integration of ads in chatbots, including a clip where someone asks, “Can I get a six-pack quickly?” and, upon providing his height and weight, elicits an advertisement for insoles that “help short kings stand tall.”

• OpenAI, meanwhile, tailored one of its ads around Codex, the company’s coding agent. The ad’s tagline, “you can just build things,” included shots of people playing with circuit boards, installing Linux on an old computer and building robots. The other focused on ChatGPT, centering around a farmer using the chatbot to track crops. 

Kate Rouch, CMO of OpenAI, fired back at Anthropic’s shots at its in-chat advertising decision, telling AdWeek, “The way that Anthropic’s ads are constructed is just not true to how ads will appear in the free ChatGPT. Free access to this technology is critical. Your ability to pay isn’t the thing that determines if you have access to AI or not.”

Notably absent from the game were ads from AI search platform Perplexity and Elon Musk-owned xAI. Musk, along with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, did earn shoutouts in the debut of AI.com, an AI agent platform founded by Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek after he purchased the domain name for $70 million, plainly stating in its 30-second slot that “AGI is coming.” Additionally, spirits brand Svedka unveiled its first primarily AI-generated ad, featuring dancing robots throwing around bottles of its vodka and spilling drinks throughout their circuitry.

When all is said and done, the point of running a Super Bowl ad is to get as many eyes on your company as possible. Despite reaching tens of millions of viewers, Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads were primarily aimed at Altman and OpenAI over their decision to place ads inside ChatGPT. Anthropic's own Claude chatbot is primarily for developers and enterprises, where Anthropic generates nearly all its revenue. So it's an odd choice that Anthropic chose to broadcast its decision to take the high road on ads in chatbots by taking cheap shots at OpenAI in ads that cost $10 million each.

TOGETHER WITH ORACLE NETSUITE

Oracle NetSuite Just Released Their CFO Playbook

When a company with a market cap north of a couple hundred billion shares their insights on leadership, strategic approach, and long-term value creation, we tend to listen. When they do all that and package it up into a completely free playbook, we sprint to our laptops and download the whole thing as fast as we can. 

The CFO’s Playbook to Strategic Leadership from Oracle NetSuite breaks down everything from data and AI-driven approaches to revenue growth to the most important levers for long-term value creation and beyond. It’s also packed with the same frameworks and tools that top industry leaders use to stay ahead of the curve – so now you can, too. 

Get your free copy from Oracle NetSuite right here. And don’t forget to say thanks… it’s only polite.

RESEARCH

Waymo gives world models a real-world purpose

As world models gain momentum, Waymo might be putting this lofty tech to good use.

On Friday, the robotaxi firm unveiled the Waymo World Model, a generative model for “large-scale, hyper-realistic” autonomous driving simulation. Waymo’s model is built on Google's Genie 3, the latest iteration of its world model series, released in August. 

The model’s architecture allows the engineers to better modify and control the scenes it generates using language, allowing for everything from time-of-day or weather condition changes to entire synthetic scene generation with simple language prompts. The model can also convert authentic dashcam videos into synthetic scenes for training. 

With the Waymo World Model, the company leveraged Genie’s ability to generate photorealistic, interactive 3D environments, applying it specifically to the “driving domain.” This allows the world model to generate rare events, including: 

• An elephant appearing in the middle of the road; 

• Being chased down a freeway by a tornado; 

• And driving through a tropical city that happens to be covered in snow.

This kind of training could help prepare Waymo to scale across new locations and driving environments, potentially even allowing the robotaxis to better handle natural disasters.

The company has faced scrutiny for its safety practices in recent weeks after one of its vehicles struck and injured a child in California. In a hearing this week, Waymo’s Chief Safety Officer Mauricio Peña acknowledged that the company relies on remote operators overseas for “guidance in certain situations,” but these operators do not pilot the vehicles themselves. 

“By simulating the 'impossible', we proactively prepare the Waymo Driver for some of the most rare and complex scenarios,” The company said in its announcement. 

Waymo’s model adds to growing enthusiasm for world models. Google last week released Project Genie, an “experimental research prototype” built on Genie 3 that lets users create and explore virtual worlds and video game-like environments. World model startups from AI pioneers like Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are also in talks for massive funding rounds as investors search for the next big thing after LLMs. 

Many of AI’s foremost thinkers have cast doubt on the idea that scaling large language models is the key to achieving artificial general intelligence, arguing instead that models need a sense of real-world environments and physics to achieve human-level performance. However, with the viability and practicality of AGI itself up for debate, world models face the same existential question as large language models: How useful will this tech actually be? Though the developers of these systems tout a vast number of theoretical use cases, Waymo wading into world models for self-driving vehicles is one of the first tangible examples of giving this technology a purpose. 

TOGETHER WITH INNOVATING WITH AI

Custom AI solutions from engineers who’ve built for Harvard and The World Bank

HDC builds AI agents, automated workflows, and private AI infrastructure for enterprises and organizations that can't afford to get it wrong. We design intelligent tools tailored to your specific operations and integrated with your existing systems – not generic solutions bolted on as an afterthought. 

For teams with strict security and compliance requirements, we offer fully air-gapped deployments where your data never leaves your environment. Fixed project fees, clear timelines, and a senior U.S.-based team. Our approach has earned the trust of the world's most demanding organizations since 2009.

Book a free AI consultation with our team →

PRODUCTS

Apple's 2026 AI device gambit is taking shape

Apple's playbook: enter late, do it better, make it mainstream. AI hardware could be next.

In an internal meeting, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke to employees about the importance of the AI moment, calling it “one of the most profound opportunities of our entire lifetime,” and highlighted the company's strong position to deliver meaningful AI features to customers, according to a Bloomberg report. One way the company plans to do so: hardware. 

“There will be new categories of products and services that are enabled through AI, and we’re extremely excited about that,” said Cook. “We’re excited about the opportunities that it opens for Apple.”

This would be a different approach for Apple, which, to date, has had limited success competing in the AI race. Despite announcing an AI overhaul for Siri at WWDC 2024 to make the AI assistant a more advanced personal intelligence system, it has yet to deliver on the promise. 

Yet, this year, Apple is preparing to turn things around, with the first step being its multi-year agreement with Google to use Gemini’s AI models to power its next-gen version of Siri. Apple also has plans to turn Siri into the company’s first artificial intelligence chatbot with the launch of iOS 27, according to another Bloomberg report. While these voice assistant updates have been highly anticipated, delving into hardware would open a new frontier. 

AI devices are gaining traction, with smartglasses being the first big hit. Shipments grew 110% YoY in the first half of 2025, according to Counterpoint Research. Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis recently said the Gemini-powered Samsung smartglasses could arrive as soon as this summer. 

While other AI wearable form factors, such as rings, pins, and more, have emerged, none have taken off with consumers. OpenAI is developing its much-anticipated AI hardware device in collaboration with Jony Ive, Apple's former design lead. That may be the first real stab at a mainstream AI device. The latest reports suggest it will be a smart AI earbud. 

Still, Apple has a huge advantage in hardware. It knows how to build high-quality, well-designed devices, and it has a loyal early-adopter base ready to buy. It can also pair the device with a valuable set of services for music, fitness, and more. Most importantly, it has a track record of popularizing new device categories. However, that may depend on Apple taking a creative leap and not sticking to a safe choice, such as an Alexa-like AI smart speaker with a screen that has reportedly been in the works.

When AI first emerged, there was a lot of hesitation surrounding safety, privacy, and ethical use of the technology. While many people still have those concerns, and rightfully so, there has been a general shift in people’s willingness to use AI tools. The most prominent example is the growing use of not just chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini but also other AI tools such as Claude Code and OpenClaw, which have gone viral more recently. On the hardware side, the growth of AI smart glasses that record the world from your POV and answer basic AI questions reflects the same shift. As a result, Apple may now have the perfect window to enter the fray.

LINKS

• Amazon, Google and Microsoft have a total of $1.1 trillion in cloud backlog

• Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei says humanities studies are “more important than ever”

• AI chip firm SambaNova raises $350 million series E

• OpenAI in talks with Abu Dhabi’s G42 for UAE-specialized ChatGPT

• OpenClaw partners with VirusTotal for safety scans of ClawHub skills

• Anthropic rolls out fast mode for Claude Opus 4.6

• ChatGPT Atlas upgrade: OpenAI’s AI browser got several upgrades, with the biggest being the ability to save prompts that you use frequently, addressing a major obstacle.

• Model Council: Perplexity Max users can now run three of the models available on Perplexity at once and then get an answer that shows where the models agree and where they differ. 

• OpenAI Frontier: An orchestration platform aimed at enterprises that allows them to build, deploy, and manage AI agents. 

• Kaggle Game Arena: A benchmarking platform where top models compete in livestreamed and replayable games.

• xAI: Member of Technical Staff, Frontiers of Deep Learning Scaling

• Sony: R&D Intern – AI Computational Photography & Computer Vision

• Meta: Product Security Engineer, Native

• Nvidia: Senior Research Scientist, System Software and I/O Architecture

GAMES

A QUICK POLL BEFORE YOU GO