Ben Affleck is an AI nerd

Ben Affleck, in his role leading a film-AI company he founded in 2022, built a production-focused approach to video generative models because he judged public models - trained on peers’ films - to be commercially unusable. His 16-person shop, InterPositive, developed a workflow that starts from open video models but "unfreezes" weights and retrains only a final "cinematic" layer so outputs meet real production standards. Rather than rely on third-party datasets, the team spent eight months shooting a controlled dataset specifically for late-stage fine-tuning, then applies per-production fine-tuning on a film’s own dailies so each production retains both footage and the learned model. That combination of controlled base data plus private, per-film models is presented as the product Netflix paid $587 million in cash to acquire in March 2026.

The substance is both technical and commercial: a targeted fine-tuning technique (last-layer retraining) to align generative outputs with cinematic requirements, a data-collection strategy to avoid training on competitors’ work, and a business model that sells privacy and ownership of creative assets. Affleck’s public comments also trace a shift from skepticism about AI’s creative role toward building practical tools, while flagging broader concerns such as educational impacts and learned dependence on AI.