Three stories crossed my desk this week. Two are about Hollywood making room for AI. The third is about a new model and a reminder to read the fine print. 1. Culver City is turning into an AI studio town. The LA Times counts a cluster of AI filmmaking companies moving in: Promise, TrueShort, Native Foreign, PhantomX, and Luma AI, which took a 7,000-square-foot space for its Dream Lab. Promise works hybrid: real actors on real soundstages, with AI handling backgrounds, visual effects and synthetic humans. Not "push a button, get a movie." Real crews, new tools. (The unions are watching closely, and they should be.) 2. AI studios now have a manager. Variety is reporting that former UTA agent Dante DeSario launched Collage, a management and investment company that walks AI-first studios through the guilds, the studios, and the copyright questions. Clients include Asteria, Native Foreign, Promise, and Jason Zada's Secret Level. When Hollywood builds representation for something, it has decided that it's real. And his word for what separates the good ones? Taste. 3. A fast, free video model... with a catch. Hao AI Lab released FastH3 Omni, a sped-up version of MiniMax's H3 model. Feed it reference images, clips and a voice, and it gives you video with sound, up to about 12x faster than the original by their own numbers. It already works in ComfyUI. Everyone called it "open." Here's the thing: the license on the model doesn't cover the US, the UK, the EU or South Korea. If you're here, you have to ask MiniMax for permission first. Read the license before the benchmark. Notice Native Foreign shows up in the first two stories. The buildings and the business side landed in the same week, here in LA. Where it goes from here... we'll see.

AI-generated chase sequence through Mumbai — the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, a rain-soaked bazaar, and a desert road standoff.

I created multiple AI-generated tsunami VFX shots to test the limits of AI video generation. This was purely a visual AI/VFX experiment — I wanted to see how well AI could create a massive tsunami hitting realistic city environments.