Limitless: An AI Podcast - OpenAI Device Leak: They Claim Fake News, But We're Not So Sure!

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

We look into the buzz around a leaked Super Bowl ad for OpenAI's anticipated consumer AI hardware, sparked by a Reddit claim that the ad was pulled. OpenAI’s president labeled it “fake news,” prompting us to discuss a rumored $6.5 billion partnership with designer Jony Ive and the challenges of entering a hardware market dominated by giants like Apple.------🌌 LIMITLESS HQ ⬇️NEWSLETTER:    https://limitlessft.substack.com/FOLLOW ON X:   https://x.com/LimitlessFTSPOTIFY:             https://open.spotify.com/show/5oV29YUL8AzzwXkxEXlRMQAPPLE:                 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/limitless-podcast/id1813210890RSS FEED:           https://limitlessft.substack.com/------TIMESTAMPS0:00 The Super Bowl Tease1:40 Unpacking the Leaked Ad4:10 The Legitimacy Debate6:20 Mixed Signals9:32 A Difficult Industry16:04 Pressure on OpenAI18:00 Concluding Thoughts on Reality19:34 Questions for the Future------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/JoshKaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Picture this. It's Super Bowl Sunday, 140 million people are tuned in tensions at our all-time high. And a mysterious Reddit account posts about how Open AI was supposed to release an advert about their new consumer AI hardware device. Minutes later, someone hacks into this person's server and reveals a 35-second long polished advert featuring celebrity Alexander Scarsgaard wearing futuristic, stainless steel over-the-ear, pair of earbuds, and staring at a mysterious pebble-like metal device. The internet absolutely explodes. News publications posts about this, tech Twitter absolutely blows up. Until a few hours later, when the president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, shuts it down with two words, fake news.

Now, the advert might have been fake, but the device is very real. And on this episode, we're going to explore the $6.5 billion love child between Open AI and Johnny Ive and revealing why that's going to lead to three potential new devices this year. Yeah, I have a lot of questions about the legitimacy of this. The way in which we came to discovering this ad, which we're going to get into, this is very much an investigative episode, but I figured the best place to start is probably just to show the leaked ad. So let's watch that first before we talk about it. Man, it really looks so good.

Dime, almost time. Okay, there's a lot to unpack with this video. But first, maybe let's set the backstory of how we came to discover this. So as the Super Bowl was winding down on Sunday night, a Reddit account. account named Winihada, which has since been deleted, posted what appeared to be a rant of a frustrated Open AI employee. And the story was pretty simple. They'd worked on this incredible Super Bowl commercial for Open AI's first hardware device, and it was supposed to air during the game. But at the last minute, leadership got cold feet, supposedly because of all the heat they were taking

from Anthropics attack ads, and swapped it out for a safer commercial about their Codex coding tool that we saw in the Super Bowl. The employee was seemingly, or I guess the employee, was seemingly livid, and in their frustration, they leaked a screenshot of what was supposedly the original ad. Now, here's where things get interesting, because when people in the Reddit thread questioned whether this was legit, the poster shared a screenshot, which contained metadata, and an FTP link. Now, an FTP link is kind of how you share files, and somebody cracked the password to that link, and inside was this polished minute-long commercial, featuring Alexander Scansgard, who, for people who don't know, is an actor that just wrapped up.

up a new HBO show and is famous for being a character in secession. So this is a fairly famous actor who's featured in this. I can't help but ask myself the questions, right? It's like, well, it's a famous actor. It's showing this unbelievably cool looking product. I mean, we're seeing these beautiful wrap-around silver earbuds that are almost stainless steel. And then we see this metallic orb. It's kind of like this smooth pebble shaped case, which is what we were all expecting. And then it ended with the code name that everyone was expecting it that says dime almost time. And it was an unbelievably amazing ad. It looked so real. Everything about it matched all the rumors that we heard until the Open AI president, Greg Brockman, followed up and said

fake news. But something is off because it's too real. It's too good. What was this E.JAS? I'm so confused. So I think a few reasons why this went viral is this device is real. Maybe not the device that we're looking at in this advert. We'll get into that in a second. But we know from several different rumors and leaks that Open AI is working on not just one consumer device, but a range of devices, maybe up to five devices actually. One of the devices is going to look like this pebble disk-like thing that sits on your desk similar to what you saw in the ad just now. And so it's very believable up to the point where the president of Open AI says, no, it's actually fake, it's not real.

And so a bunch of people, a critic said, yeah, it's not real, it's AI generated. Now, there's two claims here. One, that the video is AI generated and not real. And two, that, you know, they may not be working on that kind of a specific device. So we tackled one by asking the smartest people that we know, because, you know, Greg's words is his words, but Claude AI is, you know, a million different Glegs.

Greg's all up once, right? You uploaded it into Cloud and you asked, is this video AI generated? Yeah, so I uploaded the video to Claude, and I asked, is this video AI generated? Now, for those of you who don't know, A.m models have gotten really good at calling out what has been generated by themselves.

And so it said, let me take a look at this video to analyze it. And his conclusion, this does not appear to be AI generated. It actually looks like a professionally shot live action teaser ad. And it goes on to give a few proving points, number one being the time codes burned in the bottom left of this video is very professional and typical of a raw cut. It says it's consistent, realistic detail. There's no optical illusions. You know, Alexander Scar's God doesn't have six fingers. And to be honest, if this was an AI-generated

video, this is the best quality AI video I've ever seen. Josh, what do you think? Yeah, I spent a long time pixel peeping and trying to figure out how this could possibly be fake. in every single frame, it looks real and it looks really well done. In fact, it's exactly what I would expect Open AI to do to release a new product. It has the celebrity actor. It has the Beethoven soundtrack that's very epic. It has the dime branding and it shows the guy that kind of like tapping on it as if it's this new foreign ident object.

It's just like unbelievably well done. But then there's more. And there's more to the story where it gets even more interesting because this wasn't just some random person posting a deep fake for laughs, there were tech reporters like this guy at Max Weinbach who revealed that a week before the Super Bowl, he'd received an email offering him over $1,100 to be exact. I think it was like $1146. Yep. To promote a tweet about the OpenAI hardware teasing this new product. And the payment was actually real, funny enough. If we go through the rest of this conversation, the guys actually paid him. He says, you know what's funny? I did send

an invoice and they paid me instantly for it. Hit PayPal within five minutes. Assume this was real and was waiting on them to send a post to retweet. And then this guy's signal says, wait, they paid you? And then he replies, yeah, he sent a screenshot showing that he actually received payment for it. So there was this entity who was reaching out to influencers to do promotion for this new hardware product and they even paid the influencers. But they never actually released the product. So there's so many contradicting theories here as to why this went down the way it was. I mean, generally, if you're creating a scam, it's to harm a brand's reputation and to cause confusion and generally to earn money, not to actually pay out money to influencers and then get nothing for it in return.

I mean, this was a payment of what, $1146 that just went right to this guy on Twitter? My hot take is this is real, Josh. At what scam do you know of where you actually receive money by the end of it, like more money than you had before you started? The incentive don't make sense here. If you are paying people to promote your hoax, you have to have something to gain from it. And let's say this went over really well, right? And they gained even more attention than they already did.

What did the scammer gain, right? They, in fact, gave better PR to open air by the end of it. The second point for me is Alexander Scarsgaard, the celebrity featured in this video, hasn't come out and denied it. And that kind of reeks of Open AI NDA disclosures, them telling him to just keep quiet. Because his PR team is probably saying, well, we can't deny it because that would be fake if it is real. So I think it might be real.

And then the third thing is the quality of the video. It's too good. And it looks too realistic. Like, listen, there are models out there that are capable of making celebrities look realistic. Like we've got a new Chinese model that came out this week called Seed Dance. And you're watching a Chinese teenager, absolutely. cook LeBron at the net right now. And it looks very realistic, but there's some things that are a little janky, it's a little quake, it's a little gritty, it's a little blurry. Nothing of the fidelity and

quality that we saw in this video. I just don't believe it. Yeah, and it's amazing, right, that we can look this deeply at a video and still not know for sure whether it's AI or not. It's a testament to how good this is. And the new Chinese model seed dance that just came out yesterday, it makes it even better. That said, it does look like it's real. So maybe we'll go through the thought experiment, assuming that the ad is a real ad. It's a real celebrity. They're real products. There was a real production budget.

It was actually filmed. Who is it for? What was it for? What are the intentions of it? That's the part that I'm still hung up on because Greg Brockman and the OpenAI team claimed that it's fake. But then what is it? And how is it so elaborately done?

And I'm still kind of torn as to what the intention of this was. And I want it to be real, right? It's like it matches all the rumors of Open AI's new devices. It has the puck. It has the ear pods, but we're not sure. I think the simple answer is it is real. Open AI is working on a device like this, but at the last minute, they had to hold it back because of a more boring manufacturing obstacle, which is high bandwidth memory. For those of you who have been tracking this in the AI infrastructure race,

memory has become the most expensive component to build a GPU or anything hardware-related. it's driven the costs of custom computers up by like 5x in the last like two months, which is just an insane stat and rate of growth. So if Open AI had planned to build and release this puck disk-like device, which requires memory, obviously, they can't do it at scale because now the cost of producing that device has gone up like twice. So it wouldn't make any feasible means for them to release. So they've kind of held back that advert until prices go down

and then they can feasibly scale this up. Yes, this might be an interesting time to bring up that deal that they had between OpenAI and Love From, which was $6.5 billion to build a suite of devices. And the alleged roadmap currently as it stands is we're expecting about five devices by the end of 2028, or at least according to a lot of these reports. And interesting enough, one of our favorite leakers who was reporting all this stuff, who we actually went to go reference for this video, the account is gone. And that was the source of a lot.

There it is. Yeah, the account doesn't exist. My guy, Pikachu, he was publishing all of these leaked Weibo chats from China about the supply chain and how the tooling was going for these devices. And it's totally gone. There's a lot of suspect things happening right now. But the idea and the leak was that there will be about five devices by the end of 2008. We have Dime, which is the product that allegedly we just saw. There's Gumdrop, which is the smart pen type thing.

then there's perhaps smart glasses, there's perhaps a home device, a smart speaker. There will be some sort of sweet. And Johnny I've in love from is responsible for designing and developing it. And Johnny I, for those that don't know, he's the guy that did all of the Apple products that you've ever used. He has designed them, basically. So it's a huge deal, and we actually just turned a little bit more information about it this morning, which is Open AI just gave kind of clear timelines for it.

And, EJAS, like you mentioned earlier, there's a lot of supply chain issues going on right now. And what people were hoping to be released the middle of this year, and those leaks from our guy, Pokemon, said it would hopefully come sometime this summer. Well, the reality is now it's pushed back to February of 2027 at the earliest. So that means we have an entire year before this thing releases. And that also kind of feeds into the idea that they wouldn't want to tease a device now, that the reality is they can't actually make it until early next year. So I'm still not totally buying the fake thing totally. But there is some truth to the fact that

there won't be any device coming from Open AI or any of these suites of devices until early next year. And that we have confirmed by Sam Alman this morning. Yeah, I think the intention was for Open AI to release one or a set of consumer devices this year. Sam's actually gone on record saying that this year was the planned year to do it at the end of the year. But I think they just simply run into manufacturing issues,

which is funny because... The supply chain is tough. Dude, we discussed this on an earlier episode where we chatted about what the open AI device might look like. And one of the problems that we raised was the fact that Open AI are good at creating consumer software for AI, but they have no experience in the hard-blade game. And that is a completely different beast of the likes of Apple, Google, and a bunch of other companies can absolutely nail. So we're starting to see the effects of that actually come into play here. And I've got to say, I'm not really surprised by this.

the other thing I want to say, okay, let's assume that they're building out this device or those devices that you mentioned just now, Josh. A few things need to be true for this device to be successful. Let's just like assume what they are, right? Number one, if it's earbuds, we're betting that like voice AI is going to be like perfect by that point. You get advanced voice mode right now,

but it has a little bit of latency and it runs on the older model. So when you release a new model from Frontier AI lab, that's typically not the model that is in your voice mode. That's why most of the people just end up just typing or chatting to chat GPT or Claude or whatever that might be. So they need to nail voice mode. The second thing, and this is like the biggest obstacle for me, which probably moves us into the competition section of this episode. Open AI doesn't have a ecosystem. Yeah. They have a chatbot and they'll release these new devices,

but it needs to connect to one of these, an iPhone. It needs to connect to your Android device. and that is where the likes of Apple, Google, or Android can extract a lot of value that Open AI needs. Maybe. We don't know that for sure. In theory, at least, the puck is large enough that it could, if it has a battery, a CPU, and a cellular chip, it can run on its own in theory and just ping the server. So we're not entirely sure. I think you made an interesting point about the competition and how it's kind of interesting how much pressure is on OpenAI for their first device to land. I mean, when you think about the comp, which is Apple devices, Apple and Steve Johnson,

They were uniquely good at setting these expectations and then actually delivering on them. And basically nobody else in consumer hardware has ever pulled it off to that level before, including recent Apple, who promised Apple intelligence and just was not able to deliver. So there's a tremendous amount of pressure on getting it right the first time. And I would expect them to really put a lot of time and effort into making sure it goes about as good as possible. You mentioned what needs to happen on open AI side to actually make this device work. Well, the voice model is a huge thing. I think one of the things we can assume with like fairly high levels of conviction is this will be a voice first device.

You will be able to speak with it. It will be able to speak back with you. And there were rumors earlier in the year that Open Eye was actually building up this division to launch better sound voice audio models this year. And I think that's a further signal that that's kind of the direction they're going to. It seems like they're certainly under a lot of pressure from competition. I mean, we have the meta ray bands. We have Apple that's aggressively trying to ship their new version of Siri. which is going to be basically what Open AI hopes to do,

but built into the iPhone, which is already where everyone is. So it seems like they are certainly in a race. And again, I think the constraint is going to be the supply chain and how difficult it is to get memory. And we're seeing it with companies like Apple who haven't been able to ship the new MacBooks on time or the new M5 series ships on time because there's just so much supply constraint

and that may prove to be pretty difficult for Open AI. Open AI is entering a battle where the odds of them winning it are really low. I'm not saying they won't make it, but the chances are slim. They got to hit a home run. They have to hit a home run. And also, Apple has mentioned now explicitly that they're going to be releasing airport pros or their next generation, it's leaked, is going to have cameras and different sensors,

very similar to what Open AI's AirBut device is also going to have. So, you know, you're going one-to-one head-to-head with Apple. And Sam has actually explicitly said that Open AI's future biggest competition is Open Air versus Apple, not Open Air versus all the other frontier. AI lab. So he's intentionally going against this giant. You mentioned Google. Google is releasing or supposed to be releasing Google Glass 2.0 this summer. And meta raybans, as much as you and I hate them, have sold 2 million units so far. And they're actually scaling to 20 million units by the end of this year. So opening eyes entering what is soon to be a very crowded field.

And it's not just like American startups that are working on this, right? It's also startups, companies. It's also like Chinese companies that have like kind of like been arguably years and ahead of all of this. We're looking at a picture of Huawei's free clip buds that kind of look very similar to the concept that opening is supposedly meant to be delivering. So they're entering a crowded market here, Josh. I don't already see how it's a clear distinction that they're going to win. I was going to say as we wrap, I wanted to showcase this photo of the earbuds because they look surprisingly similar to exactly what we saw in that teaser video. Which it was just like, hmm, okay, were they actually just using Huawei earbuds?

Was the video real, but was it a hoax? And I think that's probably where I'll land as we wrap up this episode is the video was real, the actor was real. The device may not have been. I don't know. It's so bizarre. So yeah, tell us. I mean, you tell us, please, because like Josh and I are rarely kind of unconvinced. Like, we're rarely split on things, but like we are generally.

don't have a good answer. I don't know. There's too many contradictory facts for it to be totally fake. And that's the thing that's bothering me is like if it's not an open AI ad, then what is it? Because it was really well done. And the devices are beautiful. And it's very Johnny I've coded in the essence of what the device would look and feel like. So it's really, I'm just left, I'm left asking more questions than I have answers with this one. But it leaves me very excited for what the future of these devices will look like. If you're listening to this, if your name or pseudonym is Pikachu

and you deleted your account a few days ago because you leaked some of this. Please let us know in the comments, anonymously, of course, whether this was real or not. And for the observers and listeners of this, take a look at the video. It's 35 seconds long.

It looks incredibly realistic. Am I just an idiot that has watched this video and has thought, well, okay, I've just been one-chotted psychosis in AI or is it actually real? You tell me, this has been a fun episode. I know it's been more on the speculative side, but I think it's super important to try and nail some of these predictions and take the clues that we are given.

My take is this was genuinely a real video and they had to hold back. It's no qualms against them. Like, they're running into manufacturing supply constraints. But I think it's real. And I think later on this year, we're going to see a bunch of devices being announced formally from Open AI. Well, one way or another, we will get to the bottom of this eventually. I have my head on the swivel. We are digging deeper every day and we'll keep you posted as we go. But I think the prompt at the end of this episode is really just like, is this really, is this really? Do you think this is real? And which parts of it are real and what does the device actually look like and why would they cancel it? There's a lot of questions. If you have any answers at all, if you want to do any investigative journaling or send it to a friend who happens to be an investigative journalist, that would be very much appreciated in our mission to getting to the bottom of this. But as always, thank you so much for watching this episode. We will have many more this week, perhaps even on these crazy new video models that make it impossible to tell whether or not these videos are real.

But yeah, as always, thank you so much for watching and we'll see you guys in the next one. See you guys.