{"id":557046,"date":"2026-07-19T06:04:28","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T06:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/557046\/"},"modified":"2026-07-19T06:04:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T06:04:28","slug":"netflix-confirms-it-dropped-587-million-on-ben-afflecks-ai-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/557046\/","title":{"rendered":"Netflix confirms it dropped $587 million on Ben Affleck’s AI company"},"content":{"rendered":"

People talking up the supposed merits of artificial intelligence are usually pretty quick to get to the cost-cutting benefits of not actually having to pay human artists to make things; certainly, that was a tack Netflix took this week, when it used its latest earnings call to brag about all the cash it\u2019s been saving by using generative AI on more than 300 projects to date<\/a>. All of which makes it kind of wild to hear just how much the streamer has spent on at least some of these tools\u2014and specifically on Ben Affleck\u2019s firm InterPositive, which Netflix has just revealed it spent $587 million<\/a> to acquire earlier this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been trying to wrap our head around that number for a few minutes now, trying to come up with a pithy metaphor to describe just what a gigantic stack of cash it is. But, owing to the fact that it\u2019s more money than we and everyone we know will ever see in our entire lives, the only decent comparison we can whip up is that $587 million is enough to buy 587 million things that cost a dollar, or 587 things that cost a million dollars\u2014either amount being enough to completely bake our brains.<\/p>\n

Now, to be fair, Netflix didn\u2019t\u00a0just\u00a0get the InterPositive tools, which tend to get described in somewhat nebulous terms, but which can supposedly crap out footage and shots using a model that\u2019s been trained on proprietary material to \u201cunderstand\u201d things like camera angles, directorial flow, and lighting: They also got Affleck to hang around and serve as a \u201csenior advisor\u201d on how all this stuff should be used; it\u2019s not clear how often the streamer took the The Rip\u00a0star up on his offer, but we figure being able to tell folks Ben Affleck is advising you in a senior fashion has gotta be worth a few million all on its, own right? So that\u2019s just another $580 million or so to go.<\/p>\n

Netflix had hinted around at how much it had dropped on the toolset back when the sale went down back in March, but\u00a0THR\u00a0managed to dig the actual number out of an SEC filing Netflix made on Friday<\/a>. (Sure, it\u2019s possible the $587 million cast payment listed as \u201can acquisition\u201d in the filing might have been for something else, but the timing lines up extremely closely.) So, yeah: The next time Ted Sarandos and his team start crowing about how much money they\u2019re saving by not paying visual effects artists to work on their movie, remember that number: $587 million. That\u2019s what cutting costs looks like!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People talking up the supposed merits of artificial intelligence are usually pretty quick to get to the cost-cutting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":557047,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-557046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/557047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}