Super Bowl beef: Anthropic vs OpenAI

Welcome back apprentices! 👋

Hey {{first_name|friend}},

this week in AI felt like someone gave the internet a corporate credit card and zero adult supervision.

We’ve got chatbots arguing about ads during the Super Bowl, Elon casually moving data centers into orbit, and health apps tracking your entire family… including the dog.

Somewhere along the way, AI stopped being “a tool” and started acting like a whole economy.

Scroll down — the plot thickens fast.

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🎬 History Rebooted. Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky just dropped On This Day... 1776, a new AI-powered mini-series that reenacts the American Revolution—one 250th anniversary at a time. It’s got DeepMind visuals, real human voice actors (thanks, SAG-AFTRA), and a touch of revolutionary flair, airing on TIME’s YouTube like it’s Hamilton for the algorithm age. Aronofsky’s AI streak started with ANCESTRA, a Veo-assisted film debuting at Tribeca, proving AI isn’t just a gimmick anymore — it’s knocking on Hollywood’s front door with a powdered wig and storyboards.

🛸 AI Just Drove on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance rover just pulled off the first AI-planned drive on another planet—thanks to Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot-turned-Mars-navigator. Claude crunched years of rover data and satellite imagery to map a 400-meter Martian joyride, even self-editing its plan before NASA gave the green light (with barely any tweaks). The result? Smarter paths, less human effort, and way more time for space science.

⚠️ From Sci-Fi to "Uh-Oh. 100+ top AI minds (led by deep learning legend Yoshua Bengio) just dropped the second International AI Safety Report—and spoiler alert: the threats aren’t theoretical anymore. From deepfake scams to AI-built bioweapons, the report shows we're officially in the "real problems" era. Bonus twist? Over 30 countries signed on... but the U.S. sat this one out, despite hosting most of the world’s AI giants.

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This past week in AI felt like a startup pitch, a sci-fi novel, and a reality check all at once. 

Anthropic and OpenAI took their rivalry public (and to the Super Bowl) with dueling visions for the future of chatbot monetization. 

Meanwhile, Sam Altman casually suggested OpenAI might someday be run by an AI, while Microsoft looked on with a polite but nervous cough. Fitbit’s founders launched Luffu, a family-focused health AI app, Musk merged xAI into SpaceX to start building AI data centers in orbit (yep, for real), and OpenAI fired back in dev land with a new Codex app. 

Also: xAI dropped Grok Imagine, a video AI tool that costs less than your lunch.

Anthropic’s “No Ads Ever” pledge went live in a hilarious SB campaign showing AI chats interrupted by fake mattress ads.

The tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” They argue that advertising inside your AI assistant breaks trust and nudges users toward manipulation.

But OpenAI fired back. CMO Kate Rouch said ad-free Claude only serves “a small number of rich people,” while ChatGPT’s free tier reaches 100M+ users/month. Sam Altman called the ad campaign “dishonest,” claiming OpenAI would never allow intrusive ads.

Claude’s user base is estimated at under 5 million monthly active users, compared to 180M for ChatGPT.

Altman’s Forbes interview was peak “main character energy.” 

He claimed OpenAI is “basically AGI already,” floated a plan to hand over the company to an AI model (because who better to run OpenAI than OpenAI?), and shrugged at having stakes in 500+ companies.

Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella chimed in, gently disputing the AGI claim and calling their relationship “frenemies”. 

The real takeaway? OpenAI’s tech might be solid—but it’s leadership and narrative whiplash that’s keeping partners and employees on their toes.

OpenAI has doubled its revenue YoY to over $2B, but internal sources cited by Forbes warn the pace is “too fast” and lacking focus.

Created by Fitbit’s co-founders, Luffu isn’t trying to optimize your VO2 max — it’s trying to make sure grandma doesn’t miss her meds, your kid’s fever is logged, and the dog’s next shots aren’t forgotten.

It aggregates health data from devices, doctors, and voice memos, turning chaos into clarity. It can answer natural-language questions like “Has dad taken his heart meds this week?” or “What’s changed in Lily’s health since October?”

Over 53 million Americans are family caregivers, yet most health tech is single-user focused.

Elon Musk just merged xAI into SpaceX, creating the world’s most valuable private company at $1.25 trillion. The goal? Build solar-powered AI data centers in orbit, sidestepping Earth’s energy constraints.

He says it’ll be cheaper than land-based compute within 2–3 years. Critics call it overkill—but they said the same about reusable rockets, and now SpaceX launches 80% of the world’s payloads.

Real-world signal: NVIDIA’s H100 chips now consume ~700W per GPU. Multiply that across millions, and space solar suddenly sounds less sci-fi.

If you’re a founder building in AI infra or green compute, watch this space (literally). Musk just redefined the data center race.

OpenAI’s new Codex macOS app is like VS Code and Trello had a baby with GPT-4. 

You can run multiple agents, assign tasks like testing, shipping, or refactoring—and even ask it to generate game assets or build 3D games from a prompt.

Meanwhile, xAI’s Grok Imagine API landed at #1 on Artificial Analysis for text-to-video. It generates 15-second videos with audio for $4.20/min, while OpenAI’s Veo 3.1 costs $12/min, and Sora Pro rings in at $30/min.

Creators, indie devs, and even marketing teams now have access to Hollywood-level tools at TikTok-level budgets.

This week proves AI isn’t one big product, it’s a series of battles. 

Battles over who funds it, how you access it, where it runs, and who it serves. 

Here’s what to watch:

Next time someone says “AI is the future,” ask them: “Whose AI? Funded how? And who’s left out?” That’ll tell you more than any demo ever could.

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