Mark Wahlberg talks about using AI in film ‘the right way’

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2:28TechCrunch Daily Crunch Hosts: That's odsc.ai.west and use code tcdaily to get an extra 15 % off on the number one AI Builders and Training Conference. Mark Wahlberg talks about using AI in film the right way and being open to an AI clone carrying on his legacy. I'm Imran Shaikh, I'm not AI, and your weekend crunch starts right now. For three days this week in San Francisco, 20 eager startups participated in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. The top 20 were chosen to represent the best of the Startup Battlefield 200, and they competed for a chance to take home the Startup Battlefield Cup and$100 ,000. With that intense pitching now complete, we have a winner.

3:12TechCrunch Daily Crunch Hosts: These startups were handpicked to compete in Startup Battlefield, and all of them presented a live demo in front of VCs and tech leaders who served as judges. After hours of deliberation, TechCrunch editors poured over the judges' notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists. Apaté, Phlox Intelligence, Intero Biosystems, Industrial Next, and Satellite. We're happy to announce that the winner of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 2026 is Intero Biosystems. Entero Biosystems is a Denver-based startup founded by Charlie Childs and Madeline Eichen that's spun out of the University of Michigan. It's developing 1mm human intestinal organoids, lab-grown tissue that mimics the gut, offering another way to study how drugs and other compounds might affect the human body before they are tested in people.

4:01TechCrunch Daily Crunch Hosts: The startup sells its flagship product, GastroScreen, to pharmaceutical biotech, food, and chemical companies for testing drugs and other compounds. Read more about Intero Biosystems right now at TechCrunch.com. Meta has launched what it calls the most capable open-weight model in the United States. Dubbed Muse Spark Open, the model also has the distinction of having been designed to work with Max. The new model, which leverages 816 billion parameters and a 1 million token context window, claims to offer superior performance to other popular open-weight models. according to evaluation results released by Meta on Thursday.

4:41TechCrunch Daily Crunch Hosts: Muse SparkOpen is natively multimodal and built for complex coding tasks and agentic labor. It's also been designed to run locally on Apple's computers. However, you will still need a lot of power to run the model locally, with a requirement of at least 1TB of RAM per engadget. The model will run best via the Mac Studio that comes equipped with the M5 Ultra chip. Still, if you can muster the memory, Muse SparkOpen may prove a significant workhorse for coding and other desktop tasks. Meta says that it paired the model with MuseCode, its AI coding terminal, and deployed it to various agentic workflows, including coding fixes for a Mastodon client that included bug fixes, new features, and full build.

5:24TechCrunch Daily Crunch Hosts: The company says it also deployed it in the service of running DaVinci Resolve, the high-end video editing software, revealing that the model was capable of reviewing and cropping footage. Openweight models provide a number of distinct industry advantages that aren't afforded by closed and proprietary models. Openweight models can be significantly more cost-efficient and can also offer transparency and flexibility that closed-source models just don't allow. Meta is making the new model available now through a number of different API platforms. Well, even as Hollywood remains divided over the use of AI in filmmaking, actor and director Mark Wahlberg believes the tech has a place in the industry as long as it's used the right way.

6:07TechCrunch Daily Crunch Hosts: You see, Wahlberg, who's also an entrepreneur and angel investor, took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to share his perspective on AI's role in filmmaking and how he's open to having an AI likeness of himself carry on his legacy. The actor said he plans to potentially use AI to enhance certain aspects of the upcoming Pete Rose biopic, in which he'll star in the title role. It's a fairly expensive movie, but we're talking about utilizing AI to enhance the stadium setting, things of that nature, Wahlberg said, continuing, I don't think you should just, you know, put an idea into ChatGPT and it puts out a script and then you should go make that and not use real actors.

6:42TechCrunch Daily Crunch Hosts: But if you can use it to enhance what you're doing, I'm all for that. That said, Wahlberg made special mention of his belief that storytelling should remain at the heart of filmmaking. I've done big effects-driven movies, Wahlberg said, continuing, I think I was in that kind of sweet spot when the first Jurassic Park was made or when Perfect Storm came out and you had that wave, the 100-foot wave that was in the trailer. Those are cutting-edge moments in technology with computer-generated images. Now, I think it's hard to do that, so I'm not so passionate about effects-driven movies per se, as opposed to real storytelling.

7:17TechCrunch Daily Crunch Hosts: When asked by TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos whether he had visited the CAA Vault, a creative artist's agency facility which lets actors use scanning technology to capture their bodies, faces, movements, and voices to create AI replicas, Wahlberg said he hadn't but would be open to the idea. I would be interested because I think in the future if that's where things go, it would be cool that my children or my grandchildren could be in charge of my likeness and my image and hopefully put me in some good movies, Wahlberg said, continuing, it'll be interesting to see where things go. He even said he wouldn't be opposed if his upcoming animated series, Ted, continued for decades with an AI version of his likeness.

7:58TechCrunch Daily Crunch Hosts: I think it's cool if I'm no longer able to do it or don't exist, and if it could continue and people want to see it. I think it'd be interesting to see where things go, Wahlberg said, continuing, I think there's certain things from my childhood that I wish still existed and were still a part of my life. I wouldn't be opposed to it. I think people are going to have massive opportunities to watch whatever it is they want. And if there's a real audience for that, they should be entitled to have what they want to see. And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Lucas Ropec, Aisha Malik, Sean O 'Kane, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.

8:33TechCrunch Daily Crunch Hosts: We'll see you here next week. And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.

9:10Mark Wahlberg: Thank you. fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com.