Show Me AI Super Bowl Ads Without Showing Me AI

Welcome back to your AI weekly roundup, where we dive into the latest developments in artificial intelligence.

In this issue, we explore how tech companies highlighted their AI innovations during the Super Bowl, discuss OpenAI's introduction of a powerful generative AI tool for producing photorealistic videos, and examine why Nvidia has now exceeded Amazon in value.

The Prompt

It's one of those newsletters where we take a look back at Super Bowl LVIII. But it's not about who won (unfortunately, not my beloved San Francisco 49ers), but the commercials.

In 2023, the NFL's big game got tagged as the "Crypto Bowl" thanks to a ton of crypto companies advertising. Now, with crypto hitting a rough patch and AI buzz taking over, would we be bombarded with AI ads?

Turns out, no. There were probably a handful of commercials produced pitching AI including Microsoft, Anthropic, Google, and Crowdstrike. For those ads fortunate enough to make the televised cut, the focus shifted away from the technology itself and towards the potential for streamlining our lives. It was less about what Large Language Model was used, GPTs you can download from a store, or any other blatant plug for AI itself. Instead, the technology blended into the background, quietly helping to promote the software it was baked into.

"AI is not some ethereal giant thing that's housed somewhere. It's the thing that's going to be right in front of you to do little things that matter and that add up to big things. It's not just these giant things you hear about like curing cancer and saving the world," Microsoft Chief Brand Officer Kathleen Hall said in an interview with Digiday's Marty Swant.

In its Super Bowl ad, the Windows maker showcased how its AI companion app, Copilot, can empower us to turn ideas into action and hope into reality.

Google's TV spot didn't mention Gemini, Google Assistant or PaLM. Rather, the company plugged the accessibility features its Pixel 8 smartphone provided.

Anthropic was perhaps the only tech company that explicitly mentioned AI during the Super Bowl. However, if you blinked, you might have missed it, since it was only a five-second commercial with just text on the screen reading "Claude is a next-generation AI assistant."

Additionally, a non-tech company produced at least one AI-related commercial. Illumination, as part of its promotion for "Despicable Me 4," aired a spot featuring minions humorously mocking the limitations of DALL-E and other text-to-image tools.

All in all, to appeal to the mainstream, tech companies opted not to toss AI in our faces and instead chose wisely to spend $7 million to promote the benefits and use cases. It's a smart move, especially with growing concern over AI's influence on deepfakes and misinformation.

Now, as to whether any of these commercials were effective in enticing people to try out these products is another story.

Editor's note

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A Closer Look

OpenAI made headlines once again this week and for at least several reasons. It disclosed that state-affiliated threat actors were using AI to conduct malicious cybersecurity attacks. Then, it's reported that CEO Sam Altman is negotiating with the U.S. to receive its blessing before raising billions for his AI chip venture. And let's not forget about OpenAI possibly building a Bing-powered search engine...

But it's the unveiling of Sora that has everyone talking.

OpenAI's text-to-video gen AI hasn't been released to the public yet, but the company did offer a glimpse of some clips created by it. These brief clips are astonishingly photorealistic and may leave you eager to try your hand at filmmaking. However, OpenAI has announced that only selected creators and researchers will have access to it for now as it continues to look for ways to minimize the risk of Sora being misused for misinformation or deepfakes.

While Gen AI video creation has been around for a while, the quality and duration have consistently fallen short. And there's no shortage of options, from DeepBrain AI and Synthesia to Lumen5 and Kapwing. OpenAI's entry with Sora likely makes it the dominant player in the space, thanks to the training data it has at its disposal.

From Wired's Steven Levy:

While the scenes are certainly impressive, the most startling of Sora’s capabilities are those that it has not been trained for. Powered by a version of the diffusion model used by OpenAI’s Dalle-3 image generator as well as the transformer-based engine of GPT-4, Sora does not merely churn out videos that fulfill the demands of the prompts, but does so in a way that shows an emergent grasp of cinematic grammar.

I imagine startups consumerizing text-to-video like Aug X Labs can't wait for OpenAI to grant them access to Sora.

But as we witness the scary progress of gen AI video, it's a reminder of what will happen to filmmaking, TV shows, media and also video games — you think rendering using Unreal Engines is something? Just wait...

Sora, like other AI tools, is having a polarizing effect on the creative community with job displacement being cited as the biggest risk. And there's also the larger copyright issue that has yet to be resolved.

And if you think it's hard now to decipher whether something is real or AI-generated, it might be near-impossible in the coming future.

Be sure to read Dan Shipper's article discussing the future of filmmaking for an insightful analysis of Sora's influence.

Today's Visual Snapshot

This week, Nvidia's market capitalization surpassed Amazon's, making the chip maker the fourth most valuable company in the world. The strong demand for AI chips is credited to Nvidia's skyrocketing prosperity.

Despite both companies boasting strong earnings previously, the graphs above illustrate Nvidia's market cap steadily converging with Amazon's, particularly since late 2021. Additionally, Nvidia's growth increased by nearly 400 percent in the past two years compared to Amazon's 7.6 percent over the same period.

Nvidia will likely continue to see growing demand for its chips as AI innovation doesn't appear to be dying out any time soon.

Quote This

Sam, please don't make me homeless

— Content creator MrBeast, pleading to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (likely in jest), after the company unveiled its Sora video generation model

Neural Nuggets

?? General Industry News

• A Waymo driverless taxi was vandalized and destroyed in San Francisco by a crowd (The Verge)
• OpenAI announces invite-only community forum to connect "domain experts and students" to discuss and collaborate on AI (VentureBeat)
• Lenovo may be working on an AI-powered operating system to run on its PCs (TechRadar)
• Microsoft Build to start on May 21 with AI news expected to be announced (The Verge)
• Why AI companies are obsessed with helping you plan your next trip (The Atlantic)
• How to choose between ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini (Wired)

?? Machine Learning

• Amazon researchers have trained the largest-ever text-to-speech model to date, claims it exhibits “emergent” qualities (TechCrunch)
• Google launches Gemini 1.5, its next-generation AI model, for developers and enterprise users (MIT Technology Review)
• Cohere for AI releases an open-source multilingual LLM called Aya that can follow instructions in more than 100 languages (Axios)
• Meta releases V-JEPA, a new LLM that learns from watching videos (Fast Company)

?? Generative AI

• OpenAI reportedly developing a Google search rival, partly powered by Microsoft’s Bing (SlashGear)
• Everything you need to know about Google Gemini (TechCrunch)
• These are the pranksters behind Goody-2, the “most responsible” AI chatbot (Wired)
• Stability AI previews Stable Cascade, its new text-to-image gen AI model (VentureBeat)
• Gen Z embraces gen AI, saying it gives them an advantage in school and work (Axios)
• OpenAI founding member and researcher Andrej Karpathy steps down, and says nothing “happened” (TechCrunch)

?? Commerce

• Amazon and Walmart want to use GenAI to transform online shopping. This startup wants to do the same for everyone else. (Fortune)

?? Enterprise

• Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor launches Sierra, a conversational AI chatbot platform for businesses (My Two Cents)

?? Hardware

• Nvidia’s RTX 2000 Ada GPU to revolutionize AI-accelerated design and visualization (VentureBeat)
• Nvidia’s new Chat with RTX tool lets you run an AI-powered chatbot offline on a Windows PC (TechCrunch)

?? Science and Breakthroughs

• WindBorne Systems surpasses DeepMind, Huawei, and Nvidia to be the leader in using AI to predict the weather (Semafor)
• Google backs satellite project that uses AI to help track methane levels around the world (BBC)
• How Neara uses AI to protect utilities from extreme weather (TechCrunch)

?? Business and Marketing

• Data suggests AI hype may be normalizing as mentions of specific AI terms during earnings calls have decreased over the past two quarters (Yahoo Finance)
• Managers and employees are using ChatGPT to write performance reviews — and bragging about it online (Axios)
• Inside the AI-powered fitness studio led by virtual trainers (Business Insider)
• AI starts to upend white-collar jobs, showing few industries are immune to disruption (The Wall Street Journal)
• Cruise's hardware chief resigns, the latest departure after the GM-owned company suspended U.S. operations (Reuters)

?? Funding

• Zylon raises $3.2 million to bring its enterprise-grade gen AI workspace to SMBs (VentureBeat)
• SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son reportedly looking to raise $100 billion to fund a Nvidia chip rival (Bloomberg)
• Alembic raises $14 million from Jeffrey Katzenberg and others to develop AI-powered tools to measure marketing ROI (VentureBeat)

?? Copyright and Regulatory Issues

• FTC proposes new consumer protections against deepfakes, holding companies liable if they are aware their tech is used for impersonation (TechCrunch)
• U.S. Patent Office rules only human beings, not AI, can receive patent protection (TechCrunch)
• OpenAI denied “GPT” trademark by the U.S. Patent Office (TechCrunch)
• Judge rules OpenAI must face claim it violated California’s unfair competition law in a suit brought by Sarah Silverman and others, but dismisses other legal claims (Bloomberg Law)
• STUDY: State lawmakers are introducing AI-related bills at a rate of 50 per week, most targeting deepfakes (Axios)

?? Disruption and Misinformation

• White House working to “cryptographically verify” videos of President Joe Biden to help people verify it’s not a deepfake (Business Insider)
• “State-affiliated malicious actors” were found to be using ChatGPT to carry out cyberattacks (Quartz)
• Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI sign pact to adopt "reasonable precautions" to combat AI-generated trickery (Associated Press)
• Police investigate a wave of so-called AI-powered “nudify” apps being used in a Washington high school to create deepfakes of underage classmates (404 Media)
• Laika is a chatbot to tackle internet addiction in teenagers, but is it making things worse? (The Daily Beast)
• Parents are using audio deepfakes of their children killed in shootings to target lawmakers to raise awareness for gun safety (The Wall Street Journal)

?? Opinions and Research

• Why AI is a big opportunity for the news media (Columbia Journalism Review)
• AI Use Case Compendium for Marketing (Association of National Advertisers)
• Tech companies reverse course on releasing AI research papers and doing so could hurt future innovation (Semafor)

End Output

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