2026-02-10 00:44:56
Remember the Apple Car? You know, the project that was all anyone wanted to talk about before AI took the world – and Apple – by storm? Honestly, given the current state of the car market, Apple was probably wise to kill it off, with manufacturers rushing to pivot from their all-in-on-electric strategies amidst a shift in politics, incentives, and perhaps taste. Oh yes, and tariffs.
Anyway, we can still dream about what could have been. And that dream sure seems more tangible now with the Ferrari "Luce". Their first all-electric vehicle, which I wrote about back in 2024 before it had a name. Why? Because they had contracted LoveFrom to work on the design. Yes, the company led by Jony Ive (the part that didn't go over to OpenAI with the io acquisition).
If you're familiar with the designs that Apple produced under Ive's tenure, particularly in the era beginning with the iPhone 4, you'll feel right at home here. The overall aesthetic is one dominated by squircles and circles, all with absolute, minute perfection and symmetry.
At first blush, it's a bit clinical, but dig deeper, start poking and prodding, and you'll see there's a real sense of charm here. Fun little details and genuinely satisfying tactility begin to reveal themselves. The key, for example, has a yellow panel with an E Ink background. Push the key into the magnetized receiver in the center console, and the yellow on the key dims, moving across to glow through the top of the glass shifter. It’s meant to symbolize a sort of transference of life.
Tim Stevens does a nice job conveying the touches here, but you should really watch the video shared by Mike Matas, the designer you may know from projects back in the day such as Facebook Paper and various work within the Apple ecosystem – including at Apple, and yes, more recently at LoveFrom.
The entire project looks like a beautiful um, hybrid of digital and tactile elements. That's notable as one of the knocks against Ive towards the end of his Apple tenure is that form was winning out over function, with buttons cast away in favor of whittling down the device to just the essence – which mainly meant, of course, the screen. But despite Tesla's best – IMO, sort of tacky – attempts, that doesn't really fly in vehicles. So it's great to hear LoveFrom is inspired by both worlds:
The shifter isn't the only thing that's glass. There are 40-odd pieces of Corning Gorilla Glass scattered throughout the cockpit, everything from the shifter surround to the slightly convex lenses in the gauge cluster. What isn't glass is aluminum, much of it anodized in your choice of three colors: gray, dark gray and rose gold.
What does that sound like?...
The center display is a 10.12-inch OLED perforated with plenty of holes to allow some pleasingly chunky toggle switches through, plus a glass volume knob. The little clock in the upper-right can turn into a stopwatch or a compass, with its needles swinging about depending on the mode. The whole central control panel pivots and swivels. Just grab the big handle below and drag it where you want it.
I bet that swivel feels just great...
Ive was on hand to unveil the interior, clearly a little nervous about showing all this for the first time. After five years of working confidentially on this topic, Ive said he was "enormously excited" and "completely terrified" to provide our first real glimpse at the Luce.
Marc Newson, who founded LoveFrom with Ive, said: "Jony and I share a really, really deep interest in automotive things and vehicles. Actually, I'd go so far as to say that that is probably a hobby of both of ours."
And it was almost much more than a hobby, as Newson was of course at Apple as well! While obviously the interior of a Ferrari – no word on pricing yet – would have undoubtedly been different than what an Apple Car may have looked like (it certainly wouldn't have been cheap, probably not in the Ferrari range – or maybe the "Pro" model may have been), there's probably a lot of ideas that transferred over...
One more thing: remember who is on the board of Ferrari? One Eddy Cue...
2026-02-09 07:18:00
I mean, he just sort of says it. "You can mark my words. In 36 months – but probably closer to 30 months – the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space." It's about 4 whole minutes into a nearly 3 hour long podcast, when Elon Musk makes his proclamation. Of course, it was one he's made before, in his own post announcing the merger of SpaceX and xAI. But the whole "mark my words" bit feels pretty definitive...
2026-02-06 06:48:10
Stocks! As it turns out, they go down too. How easily we forget, but the past few days have been a good reminder and/or wake-up call depending on your positions. In some ways, there are parallels to the "DeepSeek Moment" a year ago. In other ways, this drop is more nuanced. And perhaps more natural...
2026-02-05 03:22:58
When reports started to circulate that not only was Amazon investing in OpenAI's latest fundraise, but they might put in upwards of $50B, I wondered what this meant:
Is it meant to say something to the market, that they recognize that everyone is asking for access to OpenAI tech? That they’re worried about the state of their in-house models? Something about their relationship with Anthropic, as the latter gets closer to the likes of Microsoft?
As it turns out, it may be all of the above, and a few more things on top. Notably, as Anissa Gardizy, Catherine Perloff, and Amir Efrati report for The Information:
As Amazon weighs an equity investment of tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI, the companies are also discussing a commercial agreement that could require OpenAI to dedicate its own researchers and engineers to developing customized models for powering Amazon’s own AI products, according to a person involved in the talks and another person who was briefed about it.
Amazon could use customized versions of OpenAI’s models to bolster Amazon AI products such as the Alexa voice assistant, one of these people said. Such an arrangement could require both companies to tweak OpenAI models so they respond to customers the way Amazon wants, this person said.
I'm honestly not sure what to make of this. Just today, Amazon opened up Alexa+ to everyone (in the US), after nearly a year of limited access while they tested it in real time. It's... fine. Good in some ways, less good in others. But it's almost certainly too early to know if it's a success or failure yet. With the roll-out, they're obviously touting stats indicating expanding usage, but perhaps they're also seeing other data points that are less encouraging, which they're not sharing?
Or perhaps they simply want to put their foot on the gas. What's better than Alexa+ powered (in part) by Anthropic? How about Alexa+ powered by Anthropic and OpenAI. That's especially interesting when you consider that Apple is about to roll-out their upgraded Siri powered by Gemini. That could very well be what Amazon feels the need to combat here.
What's ironic are the reports that indicate Apple may have actually wanted to go with Anthropic given the results during the Great AI Bake-Off – and their own apparent usage of Claude internally – but business terms dictated that Google was a better fit. Amazon not only has the deal in place with Anthropic, they're the largest shareholder in the company! But beyond Anthropic getting closer to the likes of Microsoft and others, there's this element:
Anthropic is generally more restrictive about letting customers customize its models, a process known as fine-tuning or post-training, than OpenAI is. For instance, Amazon employees cannot post-train Anthropic models beyond what other Anthropic customers have access to, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. On the plus side, Amazon employees have been able to use Anthropic models to create less powerful models through a process known as distillation, the people said.
And that's potentially ironic since – at least by OpenAI's telling – they didn't want the business of helping to rebuild Siri because they didn't want to do the custom work Apple required. Now they're apparently talking about doing just that for Amazon? I guess $50B will do that! Apple, after all, is thought to be paying just $1B a year for their AI partnership work. Everyone and everything has a price, perhaps!
And unlike with the Apple/Google deal, you'd think if Amazon does go down this path, they'd want to tout the OpenAI partnership/capabilities! Hell, they might even market a future Alexa+ this way: it's the Alexa you knew and loved, now powered by both Claude and ChatGPT!1 Oh yes, and Amazon's own models. Though that's apparently another layer here, as I suspected. They're simply not good enough, it seems, and certainly no selling point. Especially if they're going to have to combat Apple with a Gemini-powered Siri (again, even if they don't tout the partnership) and Google itself with their own Gemini-powered products.
There are probably other layers here too. Access to Codex may be one, for Amazon to use/offer alongside Claude Code? Getting OpenAI to use Trainium chips, perhaps? And yes, maybe opening up Amazon's all-important everything store to OpenAI's agents.
Still, $50B is a lot of money. Maybe this is just all about ensuring Google doesn't start to break away and dominate AI? Regardless, the 'Anti-Google AI Alliance' would certainly grow stronger with this news. Alexa powered by not just Anthropic, but OpenAI too...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 It seems more likely that they would simply have Anthropic and OpenAI models behind-the-scenes powering Alexa, just as is the case right now with Claude. Still, if they did this deal, it seems like unlike with Apple, they'd want to tout it? Maybe simply having the best possible voice assistant (thanks to the best combination of tech) would be enough? ↩
2026-02-04 21:45:34
For this month's appearance on the Big Technology Podcast, we kicked off talking about Moltbook – the Reddit-like social network build by AI bots, for AI bots. Is it real? Sort of – at least some of the content is clearly people gaming the system. But it also points to something potentially interesting/important with regard to AI agents, and how they'll interact with one another in different scenarios in the future. A really, it's a continuation of some early behavior on Facebook all the way up through Microsoft's "Sydney" situation – that may have ruined AI for Bing.
And yes, this is potentially one massive security nightmare given that people are running these "OpenClaws" on their own systems. And then there's the potential for existential risk if billions such bots are created, become aware, organize, and decide that human beings might make for better pets...
From there, we hit on the (still ongoing) mystery around NVIDIA's highly touted $100B bet in OpenAI. Sorry, "up to" $100B. Which is now looking more like $20B into OpenAI's new round of funding. Jensen Huang would like us to believe there's nothing to see in such a change, but he sounds a lot like the way he sounded when he was "delighted" by Google's TPUs...
Speaking of that new round, what are we to read into the notion that Amazon may put $50B into OpenAI? I think it has to do with an anyone-but-Google mentality that the rest of Big Tech is circling around given the rise of Gemini.
Meanwhile, with OpenAI and Anthropic wrapping up their new massive rounds, all eyes turn to the race to IPO. If Anthropic beats OpenAI to market, it may create a real narrative problem for OpenAI. Of course, with SpaceX and xAI now one company – confirmed the day after our podcast, but we discussed the likelihood – Elon Musk may have executed an end-run-around on his rival. If SpaceX goes public in June, you can bet Elon will play it up as the first true AI company that the public can bet on – one wrapped in a profitable rocket ship... Might that push the other big AI players' IPOs into 2027?
Finally, we hit on Apple's latest earnings. Great numbers aren't equating to great stock performance. Part of it is clearly memory chip concerns going forward, but as with that situation, it's AI consuming all narratives. While Wall Street applauded Meta's huge CapEx increase, Apple remains spending closer to $0. That may end up looking smart and prudent in the short term – especially if/when the market shifts – but will it hurt them in the long run? What else are they spending all that cash on? Stock buybacks?
Come on, Apple. If you don't spend on data centers and/or other elements of AI eventually, Google could end up owning the aiPhone.
2026-02-03 22:36:21
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Peter Thiel's famous quote from 2011 was obviously meant to inspire entrepreneurs to think and dream bigger than the rather trivial tech "breakthroughs" of the day – meaning, of course, Twitter. Well, a lot can change in 15 years.
With the news that SpaceX is acquiring xAI, that 140-character service now technically has a home in the stars.1 It's not flying cars, but it is flying rockets. And there's now a direct line of sight to flying cars, once Tesla is inevitably folded into the mix as well...
