2026 Predictions: What's Coming for AI Filmmaking

0:00All right, welcome back to the noise. Anyways, this episode, we're going to talk about our 2026 AI predictions. Yes, sir. Yeah, there's a lot going on that we will completely regret saying. We won't check this out in the year. Let's get into it.

0:17All right. Hello, Addy. Hey. I don't know when this will be out, so maybe I'll say fake Happy New Year's or an upcoming Happy New Year. Yeah, we're in a very rainy season here in LA. and I feel festive and I thank you for doing 80 plus episodes with me. Oh yeah, it's been great. Yeah, it's been a good year. Okay. And here's to 80 more or 100 more. 800, man. Yeah, we're not turning our podcast into an AI generated podcast. No, yet. We're gonna. All right, so I've got a board you follow along on the visuals with, but we'll talk about everything here. So we're gonna do our predictions. We each kind of have our own batch predictions.

0:55We don't know what each other predicted. and we're going to kind of go through three levels of super confident. Like, yeah, pretty much sure bet that this will happen in 2026. Very likely. And then long shot. Yep. So, yeah, we'll start with the super confident stuff. All right. My first prediction for 2026, which I'll be wrong about. Just kidding. I'm super confident about this is Comfy UI will get acquired by someone major. You know, since I have something similar, but I have that same one, but I have it for very likely. Yeah. So we talked about Invoke and Weavey getting acquired by Adobe and Figma.

1:33And I mean, we've also talked about how we're not entirely sure how comfy makes money. Yeah. But like there, and we also covered in our end of year episode, like how much it's sort of grown in popularity amongst hobbyists and people that are, you know, between an amateur and a professional. Or even pros, just like sort of the, I mean, I remember months ago at a meetup, someone was like, I've been to VFX, like, you know, this feels like the next iteration of Nuke. That's, that's powerful. That's a powerful thing to say. Yeah, because Nuke didn't get there overnight. Nuke is like, you know, 20, 30 years into what it is today.

2:05So the fact that Comfy is being accepted as a tool is enormous weight and sort of legitimacy to the tool that it is. So I think somebody to acquire it, maybe it is AWS or Azure, you know, Microsoft or Google. You think it would be one of those? Yeah, because it is a big cloud play. And like their cloud thing, their implementation of it is okay. But I think it could use the touch of a bigger company. Yeah. I mean, my guesses were of like who might acquire it. Foundry, which makes Nuke. Yeah. Maybe they, you know, it's like his is the next iteration. I mean, they spent a lot of time building out the stage.

2:43The virtual production tool. Yeah. Yeah. Which might have been a little bit too late after. They're too late to the party. The party for virtual production. It's like walking into a New Year's party at like 1 a.m. You're like, oh, what happened? But I mean, I know it solves some issues in the VP land, but maybe it's like, okay, hey, let's get in on this. And it already has a lot of very similarities to what Nuke is and could have really good integration. Sure. Or Autodesk, which does Maya. They acquired Wonder Dynamics. Yeah. God, I hope not. Character animator. It'll just go there to die. Yeah.

3:17You know, we need Comfy to proliferate somebody that truly makes it grow beyond what it is today, not just acquire it and hold it. Keeps the open source foundation. Absolutely. Going, because the thing that makes it so powerful is there's just such a huge community of people building nodes and plugins and additional features that make it so customizable and powerful. Comfy Anonymous, if you're out there, if you're listening, we'd love to have you on the show. Comfy Anonymous. He's a Comfy. He's a toy. He's a Comfy. i'm trying to make a bitcoin joke but i can't think of it satoshi satoshi but it's a comfy he's not so anonymous he's been on other podcasts i just don't know his name all right let's see uh so i had that as a as a as a very likely so i'm more middle confident about that one um let me go with one of my super confident ones real-time video with ai so i nice think that we'll get some, I mean, I know we sort of have Korea-ish, but I think we'll get something better that is very much real-time, like a VO3, but like stuff's happening in real-time that we're able to, we're not, we don't have to, you don't have to sit around for a minute and wait for stuff to generate, but like.

4:27You think that in 2026, we're going to get some type of model that's legitimately real-time? Yeah, where you're generating video, you'd see stuff happening, modify in real-time. Would you, do you think it's going to be local or cloud-based? Cloud. Yeah. I don't think that's... No, no, no. Juice. Yeah, I don't think we could do that locally. Okay. But yeah, some sort of real-time video. Nice. Okay. For Super Confident, I think in 2026, we're finally going to see what I call a VFX model. Think of it as like a Klingo 1 on steroids, runway allifon steroids, one that can actually do real VFX. What does that mean?

5:04So like give it in this image that I have here, like give it a green screen input from a camera like from your image and just like a vfx department you're doing a pull and a push you're pulling original imagery you're modifying it adding background relighting adding costume removing wires whatever what have you all the vfx stuff and then you're pushing it back out into your edit but with the original quality yes with all of that stuff because that's the right we could sort of do that now but then you're getting this 8-bit hd crushed file yeah and luma does a little bit of like savior on that side with ray 3 sorry yeah like yeah the incoming frames are like 4k 8k right like they're huge yeah so you gotta you gotta make adjustments at a pixel level and then unmodify the original image yeah i mean i think the closest we've seen now of something that kind of works like this is uh biebel yes biebel will take your footage it will create you know create your pbr maps and like all of the layers for vfx but they still have to composite it traditionally but it gives you the info and the tools you need but it's non-destructive you're not yeah you're you're not regenerating it yeah you're able to keep your original camera files and work with that um and also just launched a new plugin but yeah like runway Aleph was the first one that we're like, oh, shit, you can do real effects.

6:31Klingo 1, you're like, oh, this is better. 2026, we're going to see one or two models that are being like, okay, it's here. Yeah, it's like I want a Klingo 1 that gives me back the same source material that I gave it. Yeah. Because that's still the weak link in the chamber. It's like, oh, cool, I can give all this stuff and I can make it look cool. But it's like making it look cool. Like it's taking my AK footage and like compressing it to this. I've seen demo videos and demo like comfy UI workflows of some VFX that's done like that. But to actually have a productized thing anybody can do. Okay.

7:06That's the part that is yet to come. But super confident that it'll get you. You think that was super confident? Yeah. One year is such a long time. I know. Yeah. Yeah. All right. What else I got? Super confident, more control options and just how we work with AI. like just getting rid of or beyond text prompts. So whether that is some virtual camera control or joystick, or I mean, this ties into my real time video thing as well, but just more options, more tools. We kind of saw a little bit with like what Moon Valley was trying to do, but just more ways to, you know, control video or outputs that is not just text-based.

7:41That's, I think that's a valid assumption for next year. We're already seeing glimpses of that, right? Like Beeble, we just talked about. Beeble is a non-text-based. right and people like a yeah it's a tool to analyze some footage you shop but um even adobe firefly yeah and their new model they have a feature where you could upload a camera movement and it'll you give it a first frame you give it your camera footage and then it depending on the camera figures out the it had some if it was a very moderate camera movement i had one where i was pushing in and then like tilt it up yeah and it did that uh great so stuff like that if we do stuff like that with real-time video even better oh my god i can't imagine that's powerful yeah I just want the two of these to be happening at the same time.

8:20So you can blow up this image if you like. I just generated on Nano Banana Pro. Okay. I wanted to get the most photoreal person that I could generate. The reason I did that, my prediction, and I'm super confident about it, is we're going to see an image model that's going to be able to generate stuff that is visually indistinguishable from reality. Like no uncanny valley. I feel like we're just about there. Exactly. Yeah. You're saying we're just, we're 96 % there. I mean, it depends on the image. I'm saying 100%. Yeah. Yeah. So like, if you look at this photo, it just happened to be like the right angle, the right person with the, you know, like asymmetry in the face and all that stuff that makes somebody real.

9:01We're going to see a model output reality consistently. Okay. Every time. Yeah. Yeah. It'd probably be Nana Banana Pro 2. I don't know. I have a question or we could bet. Obviously, we know there's going to be new VO models. Yeah. How high of a number do you think we'll get by the end of next year? I think we'll have VO5. Yeah, you sound like that one guy that's like, oh, Google already has VO7, 8, and 9. Okay, well, yeah. I've seen it. I'm not going to talk about crap I don't know about. But I'm just going to guess. Obviously, we know VO4 is going to come probably at the beginning of the year.

9:33And then I will guess maybe a few months later, we'll get a VO4.5. I think by the end of the year, we'll have a VO5. I don't know if we'll have a VO6. I think every six months a new Vio sounds good enough to me. Yeah, like if you look at like Unreal Engine versions, it's like one a quarter, something like that. Yeah, they've been shipping a lot. Yeah, so three a year. It's a new decimal. Yeah. It depends on how aggressive Google invests into Vio. You know, if the team gets bigger, they add more researchers, whatever, like we're going to see it faster. Or if they merge it with some other stuff, which are some of my other predictions.

10:07Right. okay this one more uh in the social ad space kind of video space ugc ish content ai is just going to take over or be a big part of it and no one's going to care or no you're you're talking about like a tiktok or tiktok instagram yeah like short vertical ads that yeah you get like in in vertical content i'll agree with you on that one yeah i think nobody's going to care no one's yeah i think it's like good enough where you can't like right now i get you know that they're clearly the AI generated ads and the voice is weird and the performance is weird. I think it's going to get so good that it just, you don't really, you can't even tell it's fake or not or whatever, just like an AI generated person.

10:43And it flashes by you so fast, like within 10 seconds, you've consumed it and scrolling up going to the next one. Yeah. And I don't think people are going to know or care. Yeah. It goes hand in hand with my predictions for photo real image model, as well as the VFX model on steroids. like i think all those things will play together in giving you this capability yeah yeah you got any more super confident ones do you know what this photo is that i'm putting in here black hole no it's it's the at the end of the last matrix it's the ai overlord like it comes out a face of a baby last matrix are you the third one or the fourth one third oh sorry the third one uh i only saw that one is it revelations or was it revolution revolution the reason i put that up there is and this is probably obvious to most of our viewers i don't think we're going to have agi next year we're going to have a ai baby the ai babies the asi artificial super intelligence that we're not going to have probably for decades okay so what that's the way what so what is the prediction my prediction and i'm super confident about is we're not going to have artificial general intelligence in 2026 so like we need like a we need like an x on this baby or something Yes, please.

11:58So the reason I say that, and I'm sure a lot of you are following sort of Ilya Satzover and some of the big names, Jeffrey Hinton, and some of the big names in the AGI world. Thank you for that. No baby. No baby. No baby next year. The architecture on which we're basing LLMs on is fundamentally not going to get us to AGI. And we have to invent a new way of building that neural network, which is yet to come. it's i'm sure in some research labs somewhere in one of those big tech companies they're experimenting with new architecture but for that to come into fruition get trained on billions of parameters trillions of parameters then come out as like a product everybody can use like that's going to be way beyond one year yeah i can see that okay and my last one of like uh very likely i think that there's going to be sort of this bounce back of like just so much ai generated stuff and this side of kind of question of like what's real what's fake what was like human crafted not human crafted that there'll be a resurgence in the make things craftsmanship thing that we sort of had like like in 2012 2014 the kind of hipster like the whole hipster movement yeah which was you know like oh i'm gonna get uh re-merge um printing presses and letterpress and handmade soap and that's how etsy was born and yeah yeah so i think there's going to be another comeback of that and this bounce back this uh sort of like counter reaction to just um everything you see online you're talking specifically about media and entertainment like visuals and imagery not even i mean just i think people's consumption of or like how they spend their time or what they want to do and just interest in stuff in general yeah this interest in more resurgence interest in maybe getting off some of the social media feeds and doing more handcrafted stuff or getting i love that i'm all for it i think especially anybody younger than 25 like go for it you know there's a big resurgence in um finding used dvds blu-ray cds now yeah like it's a big market i mean i'm a lot younger and i got into like vinyl records and stuff and it was like and then my like parents are like what the hell do you care about this stuff for like this is old and it's like oh that's cool yeah i didn't have it there are there are kids that are now going into like um really obscure formats like mini disc and all the stuff that just never took off like laser laser disc yeah like uh i love that like yes there is absolutely you know value in um tangible goods physical goods and associating that with art yeah so i think we lost that as a humanity maybe there i mean maybe specifically to media entertainment that will be a more of a fun reemergence of just like stop motion and other types of handcrafted hand sketch 2d animation and sketch 2d yeah so i mean i would expect a lot of this stuff to also have sort of a comeback as a rebound to just being inundated with uh ai stuff maybe you might be a trendsetter here stating something way ahead of you heard it first yeah we're gonna be like the pantone we'll set the color for the year yeah okay very likely all right very likely for me so this goes hand in hand with my agi prediction i think next year we're gonna see a market correction of the nvidia stock and just the nvidia ecosystem in general they're they're on a roll they're a five trillion dollar company they grew like two trillion in like three months insane growth nobody's seen this level of growth in commerce ever so uh i think we're going to see a correction in that.

15:31Not investment advice. We're not non-investment podcast. Yes, we're not an investment podcast. If you listen to us, you're screwed. So do not listen to us. I think the minute the public realizes like AGI really is five to 10 years away, you're going to see a significant correction. Like I just read the Walmart article today that they are freezing hiring for the next three years. Oh, really? I didn't see that. Yes, because they're just like, yeah, we don't need to because AI will be ready by then. And we don't, the people we have is the people which is so bleak right yeah so when um agi doesn't come through in 12 months walmart will probably be like shit it turns out we need to hire more people if we want to grow as a company we already had this cycle a year ago or whenever the companies are like way to be ai first and you know we're gonna automate all these processes and they realize now it's like not as robust as we thought we are seeing inklings of that crumble but i think we're going to see not a major crumble but a significant one next year where things will be kind of adjusted calibrated back to reality and i'm just using nvidia as an example is because they are one of the biggest player if not the biggest player yeah i mean they're big yeah i mean like everything needs the chips and there are other companies trying to do chips and yeah though it's like no knock on nvidia everything that we are doing in the ai world today i think a lot of it is attributed to their innovation jensen's vision from 20 30 years ago i know yeah and they're just focus on this.

16:56They were not like an overnight success. They have zero competition in the market. That's how ahead they are. They've just been doing this for a long time. So they deserve the success. I just think it's a little bit overinflated around AGI, which we're going to see a correction of. Very likely. I mean, I had the comfy one. My other one is, I think, the AI training lawsuits are just like, what can you get trained on? it either gets sorted out they strike deals or just becomes a non-issue like with the clod with the anthropic case where that kind of basically said if they bought the books it's and trained on the books it falls under fair use right i think next year like that'll get clarified sorted out whatever something will happen that'll just be like okay like the how models are trained is not as much of an issue what you do with the models still an issue and how you use that yeah the outputs uh more focus on that and ip infringement and stuff like that but the training stuff resolved i couldn't agree with you more like i think um the fact that like today you know firefly has a leg up on other models because it's quote-unquote ethical it's trained like yeah that'll matter less and less as the line shift towards publicly available data yeah and i you know i think people and creatives are just gonna be like the training cool maybe for the stopgap right now and everything's uncertain but ultimately it's gonna be like is this model good can i get good stuff out of it and if you can't then it's not yeah strong right what you need it for yeah there's been several lawsuits that favored ai companies over the uh the training data right holder and uh every one of those victories is helping the ai industry in uh achieving success with publicly available data yeah and also just getting companies and partners and clients on board yeah they're feeling more comfortable to utilize tools because the legal legal hurdles are more it's just getting better yes yeah there's less i don't think it'll be fully sorted in 26 but we'll certainly going to shift into the direction of getting sorted yeah so i just threw a picture of deep seek on there nothing to do with deep seek my prediction because i couldn't find a better image for this prediction there's gonna be a chinese model and it has to be chinese because it's always out of the left field i don't know it could be uh could be a south korean model i don't know a new country on the map there's gonna be a model that is a non-us-based company that's gonna offer the same level of image video generation as a Vio or a Sora, as the big boys, but with a super lightweight mode.

19:39So like it's going to be comfy UI friendly, probably open source, probably less than 40 gigabytes or whatever. It's just anybody can download it, but then it just gives you incredible results. Okay. So it's the deep seek moment for image and video. Sort of like the next gen of like WAN 2.2. Yeah. That's probably the closest we got right now where it's like open source. It's pretty good. We run it locally. Yeah, it's pretty good. but it's not as good as three yeah i think what what i'm trying to say is like it's going to challenge the notion of like are the big boys the only ones that can make this do you think it's even that's even feasible though because even with uh alibaba and juan the next versions of have been 2.5 2.6 and those have to run on the cloud right they have gone api yeah so you think it's technically even possible for a vo3 level model quality model uh to run locally i think with a different architecture the computers have to get better too and they will right like we're always getting better with gpu and compute but with that aside i think the image and video architecture will shift faster than llm architecture and when the architecture shifts you have new leaps and bounds and efficiency what 10 gpu can do yesterday now one gpu can do because this model just runs leaner right we'll see some something like that in the image and video world next year I mean, that could also be, you know, because I'm wondering too, is like, well, does it really matter if like I run on my computer versus like spinning up in the cloud?

21:10But the cool application of this could be something that's lightweight enough to run locally, maybe not for your computer, but for your hardware, which goes into the real time video camera or that kind of stuff. So like a model that could run on the camera. Yeah. You're filming, you get real-time previs or something. That it's like just happening on your handheld device. And you don't have to like have a separate CPU processing all of your stuff. Yeah. I mean, some of the Apple models are sort of along that line. So the trick is to not rely on NVIDIA's CUDA architecture. So then you only rely on general CPU architecture, like anybody's CPU, Intel, ARM, whatever.

21:48and if you can run your model on that then it goes on a on a red camera or a venice camera or whatever yeah right what have you got your real-time previews as you're filming it that's crazy yeah okay all right that'd be cool maybe that part would be in long shot for next year that's good i got another long shot because i was trying to think long shots because i'm like it's so hard to pick long shots because like everything is probably gonna happen i've got some long shots okay i'm gonna i'm excited to hear your long shots all right my mid very likely i think we'll get an ai animated feature qualifying bar for this because obviously i know we'll get a bunch of ai animated stuff that'll appear online but something that gets into like a main festival or a major streamer wow that anime i mean animation's gonna be the first sort of really for sure heavily lifted with this i think it's such a fuzzy line of like where do you how do you define it as like ai animated but like ai i'm defining it as something like ai was very very heavily in the process for like a lot of the in-betweener stuff and generating shots yeah maybe you do a base pass with computer graphics like all the animations done with computer graphics and then ai comes in adds vfx and photorealism or style or it's like a very kind of a much more lo-fi yeah blender layout of the scene and ai enhances it and stuff yeah i know something that were ai like it wouldn't have been possible without ai tools at the budget in the time frame that they did yeah like slow the movie so i mean well i guess if if they pull it off i guess this is sort of uh this would be a very likely with um if critters gets pulled off from i totally forgot about this as i was doing this um as i was planning this out but if i can't remember the name of the studio but yeah the open ai partnership with um nick and his studio but critters was the animated short yeah open ai partnership that they're gonna do an animated feature that's gonna premiere a can i forgot about that before when i was doing this so i would put it in the highly likely category but yeah i still think mid-level likely a very heavily ai animated feature film i i love that prediction i and i don't think it'll be like a 30 million dollar budget i think it'll be like yeah that was the other part that was right that was the other part about that that was yeah fuzzy i think that's a good threshold line too something that is yeah in the million million and under two or three people yeah somewhere and flow a flow but you know done next year yeah and were those guys like lutheranian or lutheranian yeah uh yeah they were foreign yeah yeah it was like 10 of them and it was uh done in blender blender and it was like i don't know four million but it took them like or maybe it was a little less than that but it took them like four or five years to do so yeah something like that done in a year a year yeah yeah it's probably halfway done already and we're gonna see it next year yes exactly okay uh what else you got all right so for very likely i have unity and unreal partnership or perhaps unreal buying unity oh okay or epic buying unity epic buying unity i think they got like an antitrust thing with that yeah but um i'm sure you can pay off some government official yeah so my reasoning behind the prediction is they are look three four years ago it was unfathomable for unity and unreal to partner up with anything.

24:59They were fierce rivals, fierce competitors. You know, they're both massive, massive companies. And since then, they both sort of stagnated a little bit, shrank a little bit. And I'm not going to say like, you know, they're not doing well. Like Epic is doing incredibly well still. Fortnite is still a big game. But at the same time, like there is new players in the field. You've got OpenAI, you've got Google. Like, you know, the media and entertainment, the gaming space is ripe for innovation. so these two companies i think are more alike than dissimilar and i actually saw a friend of mine who was at unity got let go during the big layoffs at unity i think a year back and now he's at unreal so like okay you're you're you're part of this really small group of game developer groups like people that make game engines.

25:54And so I think it would be wise for those two companies to partner up perhaps the acquisition. Epic is really good at pushing the engine visually and sort of being really ahead of research and development in what traditional computer graphics and real-time rendering can do. Unity is really good at shipping games, especially on the mobile side, right? something like, I don't know, a billion downloads happen a week on Unity. Okay, that's great. So you combine those two things together, I think it's a win-win for both companies. Okay, cool. Not AI. I think AI has nothing to do with it. This is still playing in the traditional AAA and mobile games.

26:40So that just might make sense for them to acquire. Yeah. All right, my other one for very likely is that we get a new kind of paradigm for video generation or how we work with AI-generated videos. So something in the realm of the world model, the Genie 3 kind of teaser that we saw with Google where it's generated a world, it's persistent, you can move through it. The only issue is right now, it can only last for like a few minutes, but something in that realm, it's more of an expanded version of like my real-time video prediction. That feels more likely, this would be like you're generating a world in real time you're moving through it uh you know maybe you get your shots or you kind of can move a virtual camera in this or for gaming or for gaming yeah obviously i'm talking yeah i'm thinking like specific filmmaking applications but there's a top like gaming robotics yeah industrial yeah there's a million applications for this in the film sense generating your world like as you're talking through it and getting your shots your scenes all that stuff i think so yeah i think it's not it's maybe not in the super confident i think you're right like we're definitely going to see a big one up in the world model category yeah yeah yeah it could be yeah that's fair all these things are leading to anyway so i think we'll get some some big leaps there in actual usable world models and it could be a player like runway like somebody you're not thinking of it could yeah i mean yes chances are it'll probably be like a google it'll probably be google yeah uh It could be runway.

28:08I mean, I've still had hit or miss with Olive and the models there. I've had hit or miss with Luma and Ray 3 and their models. Yeah. But it sounds like they are working on a world model. For sure. Yeah. I mean, I still think back to that demo with the voice demo from Cristobal of like just speaking in real time and the world modifies based on what you're saying, which I think, you know, I think that is 100 % like where things are going. Yeah. Who will be able to make a usable version of that first? I don't know. Yeah. just make it last indefinitely not two three minutes exactly yeah like and i think uh sustaining that is really really difficult yeah my last very likely is one of the big ish ai video model companies gets bought or shuts down something in the realm of like apica or crea or ltx some consolidation or uh something in that realm of that mid-level kind of ai model companies yeah we're gonna see sort of a withering and a correction in the ai startup world right like there's a ton of startups and now we're gonna see kind of like a adjustment into survival of the fittest yeah i mean i also like i think that'll also happen with the ai studios that launched but that's such a yeah we'll see how that plays out i mean there's a bunch of them i mean i think even with that fabric study there was like 60 self-identified like ai studios so but if something shuts down is it really like a shutdown or is it just like a pivot or you know it's just like a small production company that i think i mean i could be wrong but i think it's a lot cheaper to run an ai studio than an ai manufacturing company like one that produces models because that is incredibly expensive yeah and that's also why i'm kind of focused more on the model producing companies yeah like a runway or a pico or exactly but they generated their own models i think the ones that haven't gotten as much traction someone will buy or they'll just kind of shut down.

30:02Yeah, if you're a small to mid-sized company, like Luma is a good example. And I think, I could be wrong, but they have like the Saudi Public Investment Fund funding of$900 million. Like if you have that, you're good. You're going to ride it out. Right. But if you don't have that, it's probably time to close up shop unless you're making incredible revenue. Yeah, or some, yeah, there's some hit or something. Yeah, so yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll see how that plays out. Okay, good prediction. All right, what do you got for long shots? okay so for my long shot the we just talked about ai studios so you know you take like a wonder studios or moon valley or hysteria their studio arm yeah yeah even like secret level or promise like uh these guys are all out there trying to create like actually make something long shot but i think we're gonna see some kind of 90 minute cinema from some of them that that is a live action-y thing.

30:56Yeah. Yeah. Not animation. That was, uh, yeah, that was my, that was my long shot prediction too. Oh shit. That was my one and only long shot prediction. Yeah. The reason it's a long shot and not super confident is these guys all have expertise in house as far as researchers and creatives and directors and cinematographers, but the technology's just not ready. Yeah. I think, you know, one of the most successful live action-y SAG things is like the, you know, Echo Hunter from. Yeah. From Cave on the Kid. Yeah. And, you know, even that it's still like it's the best that technology can do right now.

31:34And I was using real actors and as for driving the performances, but the tech for taking the performance and actually turning it into something on screen is still uncanny valley, not quite there. Yeah. I mean, also, it's like, where do you draw the line with what you consider live action versus animation? real people but real people on screen or real people like would you consider echo hunter live action because it's like they filmed actors but everything was ultimately like it wasn't like live actors blended in the ai world that was the actors were driving the synthetic performance which is sort of like that's like final fantasy it's like uh it's still an animation category avatar is an animated movie yeah okay so actual people on screen and then maybe just everything else is And when I say actual people, that imagery comes from a real camera.

32:24From a real camera, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, I think along that line, I think, you know, could be somebody outside of the US, but perhaps your Asteria promise or wonder, like one of these AI studios will probably make something. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a long shot for next year. And my bar is still kind of the same with the animated feature of like something that is at a major festival or on a major streamer. Yeah. Like I'm sure we'll get a lot of stuff appearing on YouTube that blends, you know, people with AI stuff, but an actual feature film that is marketable. Like 12 months is a long time.

32:57Like, look, and now that we're sitting here and, you know, end of 2025, I'm thinking about like you and me back in 20, end of 24, like we're texting each other, trying to meet up at CES. We had no idea of the things that we would be covering on a podcast that we have not yet recorded. like we didn't we didn't hit our first episode till like the la fires which is oh right because we're talking about yeah yeah yeah so like a year is a long time in it yeah it is a long time yeah but i think it's appropriate it's a long shot category okay what uh what else yeah because that was my that was my one and only all right i got a couple more long shots okay a long shot but i think in 2026 we're gonna see a neural renderer built into one of the major dcc tools whether it's a Maya or a Blender or perhaps even Unreal, Unity, Houdini, all those tools that are now using traditional ray tracing, you know, bouncing a photon around, capturing that.

33:55Figuring out the math of like what everything's doing. Yeah, like you'll still see the underlying thing unchanged. So there'll still be a CG model that's rigged and, you know, there's probably a texture on it. But the actual rendering itself will be done through AI. and we may see the first deployment of a large-scale neural renderer i like that one yeah okay i feel that feels that feels more likely than long shot okay it's between uh long shot and very likely yeah that feels you could put it in that line that feels plausible yeah okay put this yeah we'll move this one up oh the only reason i made it a long shot is because it's it's quite an expensive endeavor okay yeah like that it's actually integrated into there's a lot of research needed to a product that everyone that that is shipped and usable yeah and it's got to be better in terms of uh compute performance and quality than traditional cg which is a high bar because traditional cgs had 30 years to get good and it's really good so if you introduce a neural renderer has to look better has to be cheaper on a gpu than what a renderer is yeah Okay, that's a good one.

35:01All right, I got a couple more long shots. We covered the Suno-Warner Music Group partnership in our last episode. So I am predicting it's a long shot, and I'm going to get a lot of hate for this. But guys, I'm just reporting here, and I don't feel good about saying this. Suno might become ethical. They're going to make more partnerships with more labels. and like Warner Music Group is probably, I don't know, 20, 30 % of the music market. You go to Universal Music Group, you go to Spotify, you go to whoever and you try to capture 75, 80 % of the market. All of a sudden, all of your training data is now licensed.

35:43And Suno becomes ethical. So you think that like what they're doing gets the blessing of the music industry or the cooperation? I look at it the same way, like how Napster and LimeWire kind of broke the music industry and then uh apple music pandora spotify fixed it in a new way right yeah so i think suno both broke it and they'll kind of fix it in a new way in a new direction what do you think that's going to look like consumer wise because it's like even now we have some of those like country music bands that are ranking that are ai generated yeah yeah i'm sure like i feel like the ambient background music is just going to be generated like that i think the top artists are still like a dailer swift or like kendrick lamar like you're still gonna have human artists as the zeitgeist as the pop culture uh beat of the moment but yeah we're gonna be swimming in a world that's just full of ai background noise yeah like it's undeniable unavoidable i don't know i feel like it's also already happening it's already happening and uh this will only accelerate yeah yeah i mean that also leads me more to believe my touch grass make things go yeah like the artist that plays a real guitar like a leonard skinner type like that's gonna win out over like very synthetic sounds yeah you know and maybe another resurgence of like digging up old funky instruments like the theremin has a bit of a comeback of people digging up i don't know what that is theremin that's the thing that makes the sound in the 1950s sci-fi movies and it's like this metal rod that reacts to the proximity of your hand okay And so you kind of wave your hand and make the funky noises.

37:22I'd love to see that. Yeah. So I think we'll get these yin and yang of things bouncing back and forth. Cool. All right. So those are all of our predictions. Our predictions. Yeah. So there we go. We got our board. Our denoised 2026 prediction board. Work of art. Beautiful. We're going to regret all of this in 12 months. Yeah, we'll revisit this in 12 months. Yeah. Let us know in the comments if you got any predictions. You think we're off, wrong, missing something. or if you got your own predictions. I feel because I feel like we're missing some stuff here. I mean, our audience always has good notes.

37:53Yeah. Like, yeah, we'd love to hear from you. And we'll riff off of that when we do the next episode. Yeah. Yeah. When we're back in the year. All right. Cool. Yeah. Well, I would normally say links for everything to talk about, but this is all new stuff. So there's not much links, but if you want to subscribe and all that stuff, denoispodcast.com. Yeah. And we thank you for a year, our very first year of listenership and growing an audience and listening to all of you and having you appreciate what we talk about. I mean, it's so rewarding to do. This is so much fun. Yeah, I love seeing the comments too, good or bad.

38:24It feels like we're having a conversation here, but that everyone else can be part of the conversation. Yeah, so we thank you and we hope you have a wonderful 2026. Yeah, here's to 2026. See you in the next episode.