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Many AI companies struggle with customers understanding how the product won’t take away their ability to think for themselves. A few took the opportunity of the Super Bowl to change the narrative. There’s no greater opportunity to reach 123 million live viewers at once and get massive press buzz, even if it cost $7 million for a 30-second spot.

While many tech evangelists proclaim that artificial intelligence is the future, the majority of the public remains skeptical. According to a recent Pew Research Study, 52 percent of Americans are “more concerned than excited about the growth of AI.” Only 10 percent are more excited than concerned about the possibilities.

When Chat GPT came out, people were amazed at how it could write essays or create scripts based on the dialogue from their favorite shows. That’s changing, as more stories about AI replacing jobs and the need for regulation arise. 

“There was a feeling of wonder and awe,” said advertising agency Walrus co-founder and chief creative officer Deacon Webster. “And then there was a negative feeling like, ‘Oh my God, none of us knowledge workers are going to have jobs.'”

There many winners and losers among the messages attempted by brands in the big Super Bowl advertising bets. AI was chasing an image revamp. Sunday was the first step in accomplishing that.

“Super Bowl is the last big sort of mass gathering,” Webster said. “It allows you to kind of get out there and put some brand messaging in front of tons and tons of people. I think no matter how much one-to-one advertising is out there, there’s something about sort of a shared experience.”

In Microsoft’s Super Bowl ad, a group of people overcome challenges ranging from opening their own business to getting a college degree. It’s not just thanks to their grit and ingenuity. It’s also thanks to the assistance of Copilot, Microsoft’s “everyday AI companion.”

“There’s a little bit of skepticism, hesitation in terms of how someone can go about using something so new, but not knowing that it’s actually a really accessible, relevant and simple tool to use,” said Divya Kumar, Microsoft‘s GM of search and AI marketing. “AI search has been around in the market for 20-something years. So we want to bridge that gap between the early adopters and mainstream consumers.”

Etsy showed how its AI-powered Gift Mode could help find the perfect present for France. Google Pixel’s commercial focused on how its tools help those who are visually impaired take photographs. And, Crowdstrike showed how AI tools could help fight cyberattacks in a Western cyberpunk-themed commercial. 

“It’s really giving companies a chance , especially with the advertising, to pitch their angle of how is this going to be a positive thing for people for humanity and to be able to see it in the light that it creates a positive impact,” said Gaurav Misra, CEO of AI-powered video creation software Captions.

Creations makes videos in real-time, which brings up concerns over how the technology could be abused to manipulate content and create misinformation. It can also help people connect, as a recent New York Times article about how people fell in love using Captions AI translation software pointed out. That story helped the company explain the benefits of its product.

“You can speak in English, and it’ll make it look like you’re speaking French or German or something else, right?” Misra said. “It’s the type of thing that just wouldn’t have been possible before, and opens up new sort of possibilities of what people can do with it, and how people can communicate across different languages and cultures.”

There’s no bigger stage to get your humanizing message across than the Super Bowl, Microsoft’s Kumar said. The company also timed the ad campaign to a full user interface redesign of Copilot, which made it easier to see the prompts and gave more visual examples. It used real-life examples from customers to create the ad.

“It’s also a good learning experience because this is a great way for us to reach out to an audience that otherwise might not be fully in the know what Copilot can do, and then also learn from that experience in the upcoming marketing beats that we want to do,” she said.

Microsoft recently expanded access of Copilot to the small business community and launched a new premium subscription for individuals.

David Jones, The Brandtech Group founder and CEO, what America watched Sunday was the first attempt to have people understand that AI will change every aspect of our lives by doing everything better, faster and cheaper.

“What we saw in the Super Bowl are the embryonic early steps in this, but pretty soon it will be as pervasive as mobile or the internet or electricity,” said Jones, whose firm focuses on digital and generative AI marketing companies. “Nobody asks today ‘how will the internet be sold to us’ or ‘how will mobile be sold to us.’ They are at the heart of everything we do. (Generative) AI will be the same, but on steroids.”

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee’s ether company and the shares are surging

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee's ether company and the shares are surging

Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022. 

Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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The current wave of interest in Ethereum and related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, and a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s wildly successful IPO and ongoing progress in Congress on the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.

Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sells another $37 million worth of stock

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sells another  million worth of stock

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote, part of the 9th edition of the VivaTech technology startup and innovation fair, held at the Dôme de Paris in the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Mustafa Yalcin | Anadolu | Getty Images

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold another 225,000 shares of the chipmaker, totaling about $37 million, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The sale comes as part of a plan adopted in March for Huang to sell up to 6 million shares of the leading artificial intelligence company. Huang began trading stock last month. His most recent sale, disclosed last Friday, totaled 225,000 shares, or about $36 million.

Since he began selling stock this year, Huang has unloaded 1.2 million shares, totaling about $190 million, according to InsiderScore. In last year’s prearranged plan, Huang cashed in over $700 million.

AI demand and the need for graphics processing units powering large language models have spiked Huang’s net worth and propelled Nvidia past a $4 trillion market capitalization, making it the most valuable company.

That surge in value has put Huang above Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett in net worth on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.

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In another significant win, Nvidia said this week that it plans to soon restart sales of its H20 chips to China after the Trump administration indicated that it would approve export licenses.

Earlier this year, the administration said Nvidia would need a license approval to ship the chips, designed specifically for China.

“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.

Huang said during a press conference on Wednesday in Beijing, China, that he wants to sell chips more advanced than the H20 to China at some point.

Huang wasn’t the only stakeholder to unload Nvidia shares. Board member Brooke Seawell sold $16 million worth of stock.

WATCH: H20 news should add 10% to Nvidia’s street estimates, says Deepwater’s Gene Munster

H20 news should add 10% to Nvidia’s street estimates, says Deepwater's Gene Munster

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wants to sell more advanced chips to China after H20 ban is lifted

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wants to sell more advanced chips to China after H20 ban is lifted

Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks to members of the media in Beijing, China, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.

Na Bian | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nvidia is looking to ship more advanced chips to China than its current generation, CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday, as he looks to revitalize sales in the world’s second-largest economy.

The comments come after Nvidia said on Monday that it will resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chip to China, reversing a previous ban. The H20 is a less-advanced semiconductor designed for AI workloads that comply with U.S. export restrictions to China.

“I hope to get more advanced chips into China than the H20,” Huang said during a press conference in Beijing, China, in response to a CNBC question.

“And the reason for that is because technology is always moving on … today Hopper’s terrific but some years from now we will have more and more and better and better technology, and I think it’s sensible that whatever we’re allowed to sell in China will continue to get better and better over time as well,” he said referencing Hopper, Nvidia’s chip architecture that the H20 is built on.

Nvidia has been caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-China tensions over trade and technology. The tech giant has faced several rounds of restrictions that have forced it to restrict access of its most advanced chips to China. In response, Nvidia has developed semiconductors that comply with export restrictions, such as the H20.

Nvidia took a $4.5 billion writedown on the unsold H20 inventory in May and said sales in its last financial quarter would have been $2.5 billion higher without any export curbs.

Huang has trod a fine line between praising U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies regarding reshoring chip manufacturing to America while also lobbying for change on curbs to China.

If all the AI developers are in China, the China stack is going to win, Nvidia CEO tells CNBC

The Nvidia boss has argued the Chinese AI market could be worth $50 billion in the next two-to-three years and that it would be a “tremendous loss” for American firms not to be part of that. Huang also told CNBC this year that Nvidia’s Chinese rival Huawei has “got China covered” if U.S. firms can’t participate in the market.

“Export control are things that are outside of our control and they can be quite disruptive to our business. It is our job only to inform the governments of the nature and the unintended consequences of the policies that they make,” Huang said during his visit to Beijing.

Nvidia has also laid out a roadmap to release more advanced chips, though it remains unclear if the U.S. government would allow Nvidia to sell more advanced products to Chinese companies. However, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested on Tuesday that the government would continue to allow chip sales to China so that companies in the market rely on American technology.

“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick told CNBC. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”

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