Anthropic has ignited a word of words in the artificial intelligence (AI) world with an expensive television advertisement being aired prior to and during the Super Bowl on Sunday (Monday AEDT).
The AI model developer is believed to have paid up to $US8 million for an advertisement on behalf of its Claude large language model in which it criticises the decision of rival OpenAI to include advertising with its AI-powered ChatGPT chatbot.
This prompted an immediate response from OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, who called it ‘deceptive’.
The commercial will play to an expected audience of up to 130 million people at half-time in the National Football League game at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California starting at 3.30 pm PST (11:30 am GMT Sunday, 10:30 am AEDT Monday).
The advertisement first aired in the week prior to the game, featuring a muscular man with a robotic Chatbot-like voice, providing advice on building strength and then promoting shoe inserts, has the punchline: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
Super Bowl LX (60) features the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks.
Altman said he laughed at the ad, which he found funny, but wondered why Anthropic would go for something “so clearly dishonest”.
“I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it,” he wrote in a post on the X social media platform.
He said OpenAI would never run ads in the way that Anthropic depicted them because its users would reject it.
“Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions,” Altman wrote.
OpenAI will run its own ad in Super Bowl LX after debuting a 60-second spot in the equivalent game last year.
Technology giants are also booking Super Bowl commercials with Google promoting its Gemini AI assistant, Amazon referencing worries about AI in the home with a spot for its Alexa+ digital assistant, and Meta Platforms taking spots for its Oakley Meta AI glasses which give access to its AI tools.
Smaller AI companies are also getting into the act, including Genspark, Base44, Wix and Artlist.io.
