The AI Super Brawl, NVIDIA’s OpenAI Gut Check, The World Eats Software

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.

New Data: OpenAI’s Lead Is Contracting as AI Competition Intensifies Alex Kantrowitz · Feb 3 Read full story

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 too many.)

• An AGI-themed ad from AI.com, a domain reportedly bought for $70 million by Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek, teased a new AI agent platform while offering few concrete details beyond a sign-up prompt.

• Other Super Bowl ads marketing AI came from Wix (for website building), Ramp (for automating expenses), Rippling (for workforce management), and Artlist (for AI content).

• Sprout Social’s social media analysis found “AI” was mentioned nearly 7,000 times in relation to Super Bowl ads between Jan. 27 and Feb. 9 on game day, with some chatter about various ads and others which ones were AI-made or not.

• The most mentioned AI-related Super Bowl ad was Anthropic with 6,000 mentions, followed by OpenAI (4,800), Meta and Oakley (2,400) and Gemini (500), according to Sprout Social.

• Coinbase, for whatever reason, decided to air a Backstreet Boys singalong.

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The Intelligence Report

• Big tech plans to spend $650 billion this year as AI race intensifies (Bloomberg)

• US companies accused of ‘AI washing’ in citing artificial intelligence for job losses (The Guardian)

• OpenAI launches Codex app to gain ground in AI coding race (Reuters)

• Voice AI Startup ElevenLabs Raises $500 Million (WSJ)

• “An AI bubble is not big tech’s only worry: Are Meta and Google ads really recession-proof?” (The Economist)

• Pinterest sacks engineers for tracking staff job cuts (BBC)

• New York lawmakers propose a three-year pause on new data centers (TechCrunch)

NVIDIA’s Definitive OpenAI answer

• News: Nvidia is reportedly nearing a deal to invest $20 billion in OpenAI as part of the startup’s plans to raise another $100 billion. ...