OpenAI’s first television commercial did more than introduce ChatGPT: it cast the chatbot as the latest link in a history of human inventions. Aired during Super Bowl LIX on February 9, 2025, “The Intelligence Age” moves from fire and the wheel to computing and ChatGPT. Sam Altman’s essay of the same name supplies the bigger claim behind that visual leap: that advanced AI could reshape science, prosperity and human capability. Together, the ad and essay sell a vision of the future as much as a product—and that vision deserves both explanation and scrutiny.
What the Super Bowl commercial shows
OpenAI’s “The Intelligence Age” aired during Super Bowl LIX on February 9, 2025, marking the company’s first television commercial. Its black-and-white images form and reform from dots and lines, moving through a series of inventions before ending on the ChatGPT logo. OpenAI’s official account of the campaign identifies the sequence as:
- Fire
- The wheel
- Horses
- Agriculture
- Travel by sea
- Music
- The steam locomotive
- The light bulb
- The X-ray
- The airplane
- DNA
- Broadcast television
- Space exploration
- The internet
- Computing
- ChatGPT
The montage is symbolic, not a rigorous chronology or technical comparison. Its visual language makes different kinds of human achievement look like successive patterns in the same story: people discover, invent and build tools that extend what they can do.
The ad’s argument: AI as inheritance, not rupture
The central rhetorical move is to present AI as an heir to familiar inventions rather than as an alien force breaking with the past. Fire expanded human power; the wheel and transportation expanded movement; agriculture changed food production; the internet changed communication. The implied next step is that ChatGPT will expand intelligence.
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That is a legitimacy argument. By placing AI beside technologies associated with human progress, OpenAI invites viewers to approach it as another useful tool. It is a more reassuring frame than one centered on job displacement, misinformation, surveillance or the prospect of machines acting beyond human control. But the sequence is an analogy, not evidence that ChatGPT will deliver benefits comparable to agriculture, medicine or the internet. Those inventions differ in what they do, who controls them and how their benefits and harms are distributed.
What the commercial leaves off-screen
The spot does not show a person using ChatGPT. There are no prompts, answers, workflows, mistakes or examples of writing, research, coding or tutoring. Rather than teach viewers how the product works, it gives them a way to interpret its place in history.
That choice suits a mass audience and a short brand commercial: a product demonstration could feel narrow, invite immediate scrutiny of current limitations or turn the spot into a subscription pitch. The trade-off is practical clarity. Viewers can take away the dots, the invention montage and the association with a new technological era without learning what ChatGPT can reliably do or why they might use it. The spot’s call to action is conceptual—associate ChatGPT with the next chapter of progress—not a specific instruction to try a feature.
Contemporary reporting put the media buy at approximately $14 million; that is a reported cost, not a figure confirmed in OpenAI’s campaign explanation, and the available account does not establish whether it includes production or other expenses. VentureBeat’s February 10, 2025 coverage also described the response as mixed, not as a representative measure of public opinion.
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Altman published his personal essay, “The Intelligence Age,” on September 23, 2024, months before the commercial. It argues that increasingly capable systems are beginning to point toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI. The term is not a precise milestone in the essay; Altman describes systems that could tackle increasingly complex problems at a human level across many fields.
His argument starts with cumulative progress: each generation inherits tools and discoveries from earlier ones, making further advances possible. He presents AGI as both another tool in that chain and a potentially extraordinary one. Altman forecasts that AI could contribute to dramatic economic growth, help cure diseases, increase leisure and creative potential, and eventually give people capabilities beyond those of today’s most influential individuals. He also suggests that within a decade everyone might be able to accomplish more than the most impactful person can today.
Those are Altman’s beliefs and forecasts, not established outcomes. It helps to separate claims by how far they reach:
- Present-day assistance: AI tools can help with tasks such as writing, analysis, coding, learning and research. That does not mean every output is accurate or that assistance automatically produces better results.
- Future contributions: AI may help advance science, medicine and productivity, but the scale and timing depend on technical progress, adoption and human institutions.
- Civilizational transformation: claims about universal prosperity, disease cures or vastly expanded human capability are much larger forecasts. Their feasibility, timing and distribution remain unsettled.
The essay feels grandiose not simply because it is optimistic, but because it combines a sweeping historical claim with exceptionally broad benefits and a compressed horizon. It reaches beyond what a product can do today to describe a coming age, while giving comparatively little attention to who would control the systems, capture the gains, bear the costs or set limits on their use.
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Read alone, the commercial can seem like an abstract brand film about invention. Read beside Altman’s essay, its final transition—from computing to ChatGPT—becomes a claim of succession: this product is not merely another app but an early sign of a new historical era. The ad makes the claim familiar and emotional; the essay makes it explicit and expansive.
| The commercial | Altman’s essay |
|---|---|
| Visual and emotional | Abstract and argumentative |
| Uses familiar inventions to make AI feel continuous with the past | Describes AGI as a possible turning point in human history |
| Offers little technical detail | Makes broad economic and scientific forecasts |
| Invites curiosity about ChatGPT | Asks readers to consider a future transformed by AI |
The commercial softens the essay’s scale: instead of opening with a forecast about AGI, it offers a montage of recognizable human achievements. The essay, in turn, gives the montage an ambitious thesis. This pairing speaks not only to potential ChatGPT users but also to developers, researchers, businesses, investors and policymakers—audiences for whom OpenAI wants AI to look consequential and its own role to look central.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why the campaign looks the way it does
OpenAI says it wanted to make AI feel accessible, useful and inspiring, and reports that Sora served as a visual brainstorming partner. That wording matters: it establishes a role in ideation and development, not that Sora generated the finished commercial in full. The campaign therefore also illustrates OpenAI’s preferred account of generative AI: a tool that can assist human creativity rather than replace it. The company’s description does not show that AI-assisted production is inherently better or settle broader debates about creative work.
In an OpenAI Forum discussion, CMO Kate Rouch and Droga5 CEO David Droga described the creative challenge as introducing OpenAI and the “Intelligence Age” to a huge audience while staying true to the company’s technical and research-oriented identity. Their approach avoided familiar Super Bowl devices such as celebrity cameos, broad comedy and a deliberately disruptive gimmick. The restraint gives the spot a distinctive, almost documentary-like sweep, but can also make it feel vague, self-important or emotionally cool.
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What the analogy omits
The ad’s sequence can make technological progress look automatic: one invention follows another, each arriving as the natural next step. In practice, AI’s social role will be shaped by choices about design, regulation, labor, ownership and access. The montage gives little visibility to the people and institutions that build and govern systems—or to those who may bear their risks.
That absence matters beside an essay promising benefits on a civilization-wide scale. “Everyone benefits” is an aspiration, not a distributional account. The value could flow differently to model developers, cloud and chip suppliers, employers, workers, consumers, governments and investors. Likewise, claims of broad gains do not answer questions about displaced work, privacy, errors, malicious use, bias, copyright disputes, energy demands or concentrated power.
Nor does the visual sequence explain what capability earns ChatGPT its place after computing, the internet, space exploration and medical technologies. The company is not a neutral narrator of this transition: it has commercial and institutional interests in attracting users, investment, talent and favorable policy. Recognizing those interests does not make the campaign empty; it helps clarify why the story is constructed as a claim to cultural legitimacy.
What the campaign accomplishes—and what it does not
As brand positioning, the commercial is coherent: it makes AI feel less like a strange novelty and places OpenAI’s product inside a broad story of human ingenuity. As product education, it is weak by design; viewers learn almost nothing about when ChatGPT is useful, where it fails or what its outputs require from a user. As a forecast, the ad’s confidence outruns what the montage itself can demonstrate.
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Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →The essay makes the campaign more consequential and more contestable. Altman is asking readers to imagine a future of exceptional abundance and expanded capability; the commercial gives that future an accessible visual origin story. Neither proves that the promised outcomes are inevitable, broadly shared or even near. The “Intelligence Age” is OpenAI’s framing of a possible future, not a settled historical verdict.
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