InterPositive

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Did you know that Ben Affleck founded Interpositive, a sixteen-person AI shop for film that shot its own video so he could do copyright-safe video model training that then fine-tunes on a project's dailies, then sold it to Netflix for five hundred eighty-seven million dollars? The man knows ball and has an interview on this.

Derek Thompson interviews Kevin Roose about The AGI Chronicles.

Stop, stop, he's already dead.

So [clears throat] I don't know if this is cool, and this is probably-- I'm probably well, well behind this being news from people in the industry or whatever.

But I was reading about Ben Affleck's AI filmmaking company-

Mm-hmm

...

I dare you.

Uh, he's a really smart guy, Ben Affleck, and you hear him talk about AI, and he's very well-spoken about it.

It's actually funny because this was very hush-hush that he even had this company or was-

Yeah, it's super shady

It's all Fair Game.

The other thing I alluded to before, you sold an AI company this year, Interpositive, to Netflix.

I'm a moron.

Could you briefly explain to me what this thing does and why Netflix wanted it?

Now, he definitely had quotes and stuff about AI, and we've talked about Interpositive when he came out, and it was just like, oh,

hey, I have

secretly been building an AI company that Netflix bought for like 600 million bucks.

So he was doing an interview at Bloomberg Screen Time with Lucas Shaw and went into more detail about what they were doing, how he was thinking about AI, but also like, very impressively detailed about specifically training models from Ben Affleck because open models, just like open language models, open video models are available to be trained on.

And so you just unfreeze the weights and you say, okay, this stopped at step 8,631.

Because Interpositive is a mystery to me, as I'm sure it is to you.

Ben Affleck was so cryptic about it pre-acquisition.

He didn't even mention that he had an AI company until we found out Netflix bought it.

He described AI as another technological advancement that could provide tools for film and television production.

Earlier this year, Netflix acquired Affleck's AI company, Interpositive, in a deal reportedly valued at five hundred and eighty-seven million dollars.

The company's small staff joined Netflix while Affleck remained involved as an advisor.

Affleck also discussed Artist Equity, the production company he founded with Matt Damon and Jerry Cardinale, and its effort to expand profit participation for entertainment workers.

NVIDIA shares have risen about twenty-one percent in twenty twenty-six, but investors are watching October for a potential acceleration.

The market has yet to fully price in the company's projected seventy percent revenue growth for fiscal twenty twenty-eight.

That outlook depends heavily on spending by major AI hyperscalers, whose data center capital expenditures could increase from nearly eight hundred billion dollars this year to one point three trillion dollars in twenty twenty-seven.

NVIDIA is believed to have early insight into those plans through customer demand forecasts and supply chain preparations.

Oh, no.

It was Moderna, the biotech company, jumping 175%, spurred ahead by positive data behind a melanoma drug it's been developing in partnership with Merck.

Karen.

Well, Alexis, NASDAQ futures are getting a lift this morning, but not much help from Micron Technology.

The chip company did give a sales forecast for the current quarter that beat analyst estimates, and that's due to the AI build-out fueling unprecedented demand.

Jake Silverman covers Micron for Bloomberg.

Micron has become kind of, uh, a really important story because it's, it's ubiquitous within electronics, the products that they sell, and within AI they sell a number of different products.

Um, I don't worry about Skynet, and I don't think that it's gonna take over this business in any, any mea- meaningful way.

They have the receipts, so let's see what they can do.

And this goes back to a story we were covering before, which is Ben Affleck's company Interpositive being bought by Netflix.

And I know people at Interpositive, and the secrecy around who they were working for was properly hysterical.

For the first few conversations, they wouldn't even confirm who their Oscar-winning backer was.

It was government-level secrecy until the second drink hit.