The new AIography newsletter is out, and it is worth five minutes of your day. Here is the short version. Martin Scorsese, maybe the last director you would expect, just told the New York Times he used AI to storyboard his next film. The headlines are already getting it wrong, so I wrote the accurate read: he used it for previz, the sketch stage, to get the pictures in his head in front of his team faster. He did not replace actors. He did not replace his crew. The movie still gets shot, in camera, with real people. Previz, not replacement. That distinction is the whole story. The issue also covers the new tool that just took the top spot for AI video and the one piece of dubbing software that is actually good enough to use this week. Best part: there is a move in there you can steal today. The same thing Scorsese did, scaled down to your desk. Read it HERE

I’d love to hear from everyone here. As this group continues to grow, I want to make sure we’re building something that is actually useful, practical, and worth your time. So here’s the question: What would you most like to get out of this community? I want your top 3. But Skool only lets you vote once. So please add a comment with your 2nd & 3rd choices. If something's missing, tell me. This community is yours as much as it's mine. I'd rather build what you'll actually use than guess. 😉 Thanks, Larry

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==