The Super Bowl was boring. Awful Rabbit was, indeed, awful. And if you were dumb enough to waste 4 hours watching the game, the halftime show, and the postgame celebration by Seattle, you really need to find a hobby — preferably one that won't feed your masochistic need for self-flagellation.
However, as with all Super Bowls, the ads were far more entertaining than the game or the halftime show (Janet Jackson's nipple-peek notwithstanding).
In addition to the usual gaggle of celebrities hawking everything from chips—both potato and computer—to beer and cars, there were several interesting tech ads. One of those ads fueled the conflict between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
Sam Altman may be in a wee spot of trouble. NVIDIA, the giant chipmaker whose chips are widely used in AI development, has pulled back from a $100 billion investment in OpenAI as Altman explores alternatives to NVIDIA's AI chips. Altman is now considering testing ads for ChatGPT to create a reliable revenue stream to fund his company's continued expansion and his massive investment in AI data centers.
A major competitor to ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, ran an ad during the Super Bowl pointing out that Claude was ad-free, unlike ChatGPT. "There are many good places for advertising. A conversation with Claude is not one of them," the ad claimed.
Altman didn't like that at all.
First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed.
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 4, 2026
But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic…
Meanwhile, Nvidia and OpenAI are in a near-open warfare. The primary source of tension is Sam Altman's aggressive move to break OpenAI's total dependence on Nvidia's hardware.
Reports in early February 2026 revealed that OpenAI is unsatisfied with the speed of Nvidia's latest chips for specific "inference" tasks—the process where AI provides answers to users. Internal teams specifically blamed Nvidia's GPU architecture for bottlenecks in Codex, OpenAI's coding product, claiming it is too slow for real-time software development.
OpenAI has begun diversifying its supply chain, striking multi-billion dollar deals with AMD, Cerebras, and Broadcom to develop custom chips and alternative infrastructure.
"What a huge coincidence that after Nvidia hurt OpenAI's feelings, OpenAI hurt NVIDIA's feelings back... high school level behavior," Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson told Axios.
Perhaps, but the stakes involved are massive. For that reason. Altman and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang are looking to paper over their differences. Both leaders continue to perform "damage control." Altman recently posted that OpenAI hopes to be a "gigantic customer" for NVIDIA for a long time, while Huang maintains that OpenAI is one of the most "consequential companies of our time."
Meanwhile, Altman is also at loggerheads with his former partner, Elon Musk. In 2015, they co-founded OpenAI together as a non-profit research lab. It was intended to serve as a safe, open-source counterweight to tech giants like Google. Both served as the original co-chairs of the organization. Musk was also the primary early donor, contributing approximately $44 million to get the venture off the ground.
Musk resigned from the OpenAI board in 2018. While the public reason given was to avoid conflicts of interest with Tesla's own AI development, internal reports suggest a power struggle occurred after the board rejected Musk's proposal to take full control of the company.
Musk currently has two lawsuits against Altman and ChatGPT "for abandoning OpenAI's original non-profit business model and for monopolizing markets," according to Axios.
All this sturm und drang in the AI universe is one reason Wall Street is so optimistic about the future. This kind of healthy competition in the past has led to innovation and wealth creation. "The reason we've done so well as a society for almost 250 years is competition," Luria said.
How it all shakes out will be the story of our time going forward.
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