Ben Affleck talks about building InterPositive, the AI video startup he sold to Netflix for ~$590m.
Says when he first saw AI text-to-video, he told Matt Damon: “Dude, we have to do as many movies in the next few years as we can. We’re finished.”
He later felt the AI video models didn’t fully understand filmmaking (they had raw video knowledge but didn’t convey “cinematic language”).
Affleck raised money and his team (16 employees total) spent 8 months with various cameras and equipment shooting footage as inputs to train a new model (letting other filmmakers build a model for each film based on daily footage, which presumably makes it easier to do post-production edits):
“[We built our own] data set that would serve as late-stage training for open models to do discrete tasks…It was geared toward actual specific tasks that would generate value, as opposed to, ‘Oh, this is novel. That’s kind of cool. Look what it can do.’
It was more, ‘it needs to hit these criteria’…
We built the workflow. [It] is designed to train from a filmmaker while they’re making their movie. Rather than exposing what you’re doing to everybody to learn from, they retain the proprietary nature. In other words, they benefit from the learning they’re creating. They train their own discrete model using the same technique we did, just on top of that additional layer we had created.“