|
The AI Super Brawl, NVIDIA’s OpenAI Gut Check, The World Eats Software
Anthropic and OpenAI take swings around an otherwise-dull Super Bowl + NVIDIA has a very big decision on its hands.
|
| |||||||||||||||
 |
Welcome back to our Big Technology Agenda Setter newsletter, in your inboxes most Mondays from myself and journalist Marty Swant. This week we look at the Super Bowl ad fight, Nvidia’s forthcoming decision on OpenAI, and the market’s continued software conundrum.
The Super Bowl advertising fight between OpenAI and Anthropic might’ve been more interesting than the game itself.
Anthropic used its (very expensive) ad space to attack OpenAI’s plan to introduce ads in ChatGPT. The ads — one of which featured a therapist pitching a mature dating site to a young man having problems with his mother — certainly succeeded in annoying OpenAI’s executives. “The main thing that’s wrong with the ads is using deceptive ads to criticize deceptive ads,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last week.
It’s unclear how much Anthropic’s ad got viewers to “keep thinking” though. An iSpot survey of 500 viewers placed the company’s ad in the bottom 3% of Super Bowl commercials over the past five years, according to Adweek.
Meanwhile, OpenAI used its airtime to introduce its Codex coding agent to the masses. And perhaps that wasn’t the best use of ad dollars either.
Overall, the AI ads were interesting to those in the AI bubble, but less so to those outside, underscoring just how much work OpenAI, Anthropic, and the gang must do to convince the broader public to use their products. Most people in the U.S. never use a chatbot app at all, according to data Big Technology published last week.
Anthropic’s ads, at least, likely had a target audience of enterprise AI buyers, and not everyone watching the game. It probably got those buyers to laugh. And that was a win in a Super Bowl that was mostly dull, both on the field and during the ad breaks.
Here’s a quick rundown of the other Super Bowl ads marketing AI — or made with AI:
Google leaned into sentimentality with a Gemini ad about a mother and son using AI to imagine a new home after a move.
Meta and Oakley emphasized “Athletic Intelligence” in an action-packed ad for its smart glasses while Microsoft also leaned into athletics to pitch Copilot.
About a fourth of ads in the Super Bowl featured AI, with each taking a different approach in their marketing. (However, some online commenters said there were