I just spent two days at Amazon/MGM Studios in Culver City at AI on the Lot, the biggest AI filmmaking conference in the world, and I wrote up everything for this week's newsletter. It's a long one, on purpose. Paul Schrader got up and explained how he's writing with ChatGPT now. (Spielberg, in the same week, said there's no substitute for the soul about AI). Studios that wouldn't say "AI" out loud two years ago were on the main stage with their names on the work. And the films aren't hypothetical anymore; they're shipping, and a few are selling. I covered every session I could get to and owned up to the ones I couldn't, since I still can't be in two places at once. Read the full thing here. If you read it, I'd love your take below. What surprised you? What are you going to try?

NAB 2026 was the week AI got serious about post-production. Eddie AI hands you a rough cut by morning; TwelveLabs lets you search footage by sentence; and Adobe/Blackmagic/Avid all rebuilt features around AI in the same 72 hours. Not the "what's the next awesome video generator" story. Tools you'll actually be using in your work very soon. Read here: https://aiography.beehiiv.com/p/nab-2026-ai-gets-serious-about-post-production What's the one move from this batch you're actually going to try? — LJ

Two NLEs rewrote their color strategy within 24 hours at NAB. Adobe's new Color Mode in Premiere dropped the same week as DaVinci Resolve 21's new Photo page. And for the first time we have ALL the numbers public on an AI-assisted studio feature: Doug Liman's $70M "Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi" wrapped with 55 AI artists in post, a 20-day physical shoot, and a production budget that would have been $300M traditional. Click this link for the full issue Question for the group: When you read "55 AI artists in 30 weeks of post," what's the first thing you want to know about that workflow that the press coverage isn't telling you?

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.

Google dropped a quiet bombshell this week. Veo 3.1, their AI video generation model, is now free for anyone with a Google account. Ten video generations per month, no subscription needed. You can open Google Vids right now, type a prompt, and get a high-quality AI video clip back. Free. They also added: - AI avatars you can direct (change outfits, pose them in scenes, keep voice consistent) - Custom music generation via Lyria 3 (30-second clips up to 3-minute tracks) - One-click publish to YouTube For indie creators testing ideas, prototyping a pitch, or mocking up a concept before committing real budget, this is significant. Ten free generations won't cover a full production, but they'll cover the "what if I tried..." phase that every good project starts with. If you're on a Google AI Ultra plan, you get 1,000 generations per month. That's a different conversation entirely. What's your move? Have you tried Google Vids yet? If you have, what's your honest take on the output quality compared to Runway or Kling? Drop your experience below.