Fake 'leaked' OpenAI Super Bowl ad stirs up the internet

Passions around OpenAI, the Super Bowl and advertising show no sign of dying down. Soon after the game ended, word began spreading on social media about a supposedly 'leaked' company ad. As it turned out, however, it was nothing more than a carefully planned hoax.

Screenshots of a deleted Reddit thread told the story of a disgruntled employee who, upset that an ad he had worked on was never aired, accidentally 'leaked' the entire commercial. In the video, actor Alexander Skarsgård, known for the series 'True Blood', apparently showed what could have been OpenAI's first hardware device: a shiny sphere paired with earbuds.

The news quickly made the rounds of tech outlets and social networks, sparking a wave of discussion about what OpenAI's first consumer product might look like. Many guessed the sphere could be a device for processing AI locally, with the earbuds serving as the interface for interacting with it. Others speculated it might be a device for capturing and analyzing environmental data to train AI.

Soon afterward, however, OpenAI president Greg Brockman commented on the situation on the social network X (formerly Twitter), calling the clip a fake. He gave no further details, but his terse statement put an end to speculation that OpenAI plans to enter the hardware market in the near future.

The incident shows how easy it is to spread disinformation in the digital age, especially when it concerns companies that draw intense public interest. It also shows how social media can be used to spread information quickly, true and false alike. For OpenAI, it was a lesson in the need to control information leaks more tightly and manage its reputation online.

Even though the ad turned out to be fake, it generated considerable interest in OpenAI's potential hardware plans. The company may indeed be considering entering this market in the future, and the incident may have served as a kind of public-opinion test. Either way, the story proved once again that OpenAI remains in the spotlight and that any mention of the company sparks heated discussion.