OpenAI is making history without using AI. Strange? Let's find out! Last night during Super Bowl LIX, OpenAI revealed its first-ever Super Bowl commercial that cost them $14 million. The most exciting part was that it was made entirely by humans without any AI help. This was OpenAI’s first time at the Super Bowl, among the priciest advertising slots per second anywhere. The ad was developed under new CMO Kate Rouch. The ad was polished, but it never mentioned OpenAI’s stated mission of AGI or superintelligence
The ad ‘The Intelligence Age’ showcases the greatest human inventions throughout history in a black-and-white pointillism-style animation that begins with a single pulsing dot and builds through innovations including fire, space exploration, and the internet, culminating with the arrival of AI. It showed how ChatGPT handles everyday tasks like making business plans, language tutoring and brainstorming new ideas.
OpenAI used text-to-video AI Sora during conception to prototype ideas and explore different camera treatments, but the final animation was created entirely by human artists. According to Rouch, it was a mutual decision not to use AI-generated content in the final product by using a combination of human creativity with a sprinkle of an extension of human creativity (AI). Not only Rouch CEO Sam Altman recently gave a sneak peek of what the technological future holds.
Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with computing, energy, and human will. In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents. - Sam Altman talks about The Intelligence Age.
The ‘Ad’ significance:
The OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad is a critical moment for the company. Following are the four major reasons behind this:
- High Stakes: OpenAI is aiming for a $300 billion valuation and expects $11.6 billion in revenue this year. The Super Bowl ad was part of that campaign too.
- Competition is Heating Up: Google and Meta are also running Super Bowl ads showcasing their AI products like Google promoting Gemini and Meta featuring Ray-Ban smart glasses which makes competition tough.
- Learning from Google’s Mistakes: Google faced backlash recently when an AI-generated letter in its Olympics ad was criticized for lacking authenticity. OpenAI making sure ‘not to repeat it’
- Authenticity is Key: OpenAI constantly working and learning on how to present AI in a way that feels real and trustworthy
Public Opinion Matters:
OpenAI wants to hear ideas from the public. They created ‘The OpenAI Forum’ to have an open streamed talk and roundtable discussion this Wednesday at noon, featuring OpenAI’s Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch and Accenture Song/droga5 CEO David Droga.
About the Author
Zoha Imdad Ali tracks AI labs and the compute they depend on, from Google DeepMind moving coding research to California to inference chips being pledged as loan collateral. Many of her stories ask what a company has not yet shown: a price for Google's Ironwood TPU, public evidence behind OpenAI's Astra risk rating, or proof that Akash's AKT token captures value from real compute.
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