A mystery AI video model called HappyHorse-1.0 showed up on the Artificial Analysis benchmark last week with no name attached. Within days it was #1 in text-to-video AND image-to-video, beating Seedance 2.0, Runway Gen-4.5, and every other model on the board. Then Alibaba raised their hand. Turns out it was built by their ATH AI unit, led by Zhang Di, the former VP of Kuaishou who built Kling AI's technology. The guy who built the previous champion just built the new one. For a different company. The numbers aren't close. 1333 Elo in text-to-video (60 points ahead of #2). 1392 Elo in image-to-video (37 points clear). And here's the part that matters: it generates video and audio together in a single pass. Not two separate models stitched together. One transformer, 40 layers, everything at once. They've confirmed it's going open source. API access starts April 30. If that open source release actually delivers benchmark-level quality, the math changes for everyone paying monthly for Runway or Kling. The best model in the world, free to download and run locally. Worth paying attention to. What do you think this means for the paid tools? Does free + best quality kill the subscription model? Drop your take below. Founding Members are getting a full technical breakdown of HappyHorse's architecture and what it means for your workflows this week.

For the past ten years I was an indie filmmaker based in SoCal. Moved to EU recently and have taken up AI as a fantastic tool for making films while I start developing my network here. I'll probably continue with "actual" filmmaking -- though at this point, it's hard to say what "actual" means anymore. Despite the hassles of crewing, casting, and keeping everyone happy from pre to post, I do love working with people in the kind of creative crucible of making a film together. By way of intro, here's something I'm currently working on -- very much a WIP. I look forward to connecting here and making friends. I've been super impressed with the quality of conversation already!

We saw from Chinese State Media yesterday. Here’s from Higgsfield today: https://www.instagram.com/p/DWHPG1BiF8L/?igsh=MXV1M3V0NHdtN24zYw==

Stop Fighting Your AI Video Tool — Use Structured Controls Instead If you've ever spent 20 minutes rewriting a prompt to get a dolly-in shot, this one's for you. Kling 3.0 dropped this week with an AI Director mode — and it's a different philosophy than what you're used to. Instead of describing camera moves in text and hoping the model interprets it correctly, you specify the shot: • Camera movement: Dolly, pan, tilt, crane (pick from a menu, not a paragraph) • Shot type: CU, MCU, wide, OTS (cinematographer language, not prompt engineering) • Scene transitions: Cut, dissolve, match cut (built-in storyboarding) • Character consistency: Plan a multi-shot sequence, lock the character across clips This isn't better or worse than Sora/Runway/Veo — it's built for a different workflow. If you're pre-visualizing a scene or prototyping a sequence, structured controls are faster. If you're exploring or generating B-roll, natural language prompts are more flexible. The lesson: stop forcing one tool to do everything. Match the tool to the task. Discussion question: Are you a "structured controls" filmmaker or a "natural language" filmmaker — and does your current tool match that? Founding Members get the full tool comparison breakdown (Kling vs Sora vs Runway vs Veo) with workflow decision trees and when to use which approach — skool.com/aiography/classroom

Three deep dives dropped this week that Founding Members got first: 🔧 Building a Local 4K AI Video Pipeline — Full NVIDIA + ComfyUI technical breakdown. No cloud costs, no waiting in queues. Your GPU, your footage, your workflow. 🎭 Real-Time AI Avatars with Runway Characters — How world models meet interactive media. Step-by-step build from zero to working avatar. 🎬 Daniel Kwan's AI Roadmap from SXSW — The "Everything Everywhere All at Once" director spent 3 years going deep on AI. His framework for filmmakers is the most practical thing I've seen from someone actually making films. We're past the halfway mark to 50 Founding Members. Once we hit 50, the price goes up and the door closes at this rate. So join TODAY! $29/month, locked for life → https://www.skool.com/aiography/classroom