Higgsfield just raised $400M at a $5.4B valuation. Up 4x in 8 months. Runway raised $315M at $5.3B. MiniMax IPO'd for $619M and is raising $2B more. The AI video gold rush is real. But I don't think the smart money is where everyone's looking. Here's the pattern, as someone who runs a directory sitting downstream of this whole industry: → The model layer is commoditizing FAST. A year ago "AI video" meant Sora. Sora's API shuts down next month. Veo, Kling, Seedance, Runway, Wan, Hailuo — they all converged on the same capabilities within months of each other. Category leadership here has a half-life measured in months, not years. → Meanwhile the real bottleneck is showing up somewhere else entirely. Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney. In the same few months, Disney licensed 200+ characters into Sora, and the MPA struck an IP deal with ByteDance. That's not contradictory — it's an industry paying, deal by deal, for a trust and rights-verification layer that doesn't exist yet as actual infrastructure. → The biggest buyer in the room just proved it. In July, Netflix paid $587M for InterPositive — Ben Affleck's AI production company, built in stealth since 2022, explicitly designed to keep filmmakers at the center of the process. Not a bigger model. A trust layer. Netflix also signed a first-look deal with Affleck and Matt Damon's studio separately. And it matches what's happening across VFX right now — the winning workflow is hybrid, real actors shot for real, AI builds the world around them, humans own the narrative and emotional judgment. → And demand is already way ahead of supply. 67% of brands are using AI video already. AI film festivals are turning into a real circuit. Everyone needs verified talent who can actually direct these tools toward something that matters. Almost nobody has a real way to find them. Every creative-production boom eventually spins off this exact layer — the place that connects money to verified talent, separate from the tools. Stock media had it. Ad agencies built it. Traditional film has IMDB and Casting Networks.

On AIFD, I just moved the blog section to the middle of the home page — prime real estate. And I want it filled with your stuff, not mine. Here's the idea: you write it, I feature it. Latest project, a win, a lesson, whatever — the kind of thing every other directory ignores but actually matters most. IMDB has a latest news carousel feed for a reason — it's what turns a static listing into something people keep coming back to. Two things to know before you write one: 1. Blogs are a Pro profile feature — if you're on Free, this one's a reason to upgrade. 2. You can't embed a video player in the blog post itself yet. Workaround: link to your AIFD profile in the post, and put the actual video under "Links" on your profile. Sends people exactly where you want them anyway. Why bother: - Front-page visibility on AIFD, not buried in your profile - AI agents crawling the site for talent see it too — this is exactly the kind of content that gets you surfaced when someone (human or AI) searches for what you do - Builds a track record over time, like an IMDB news page for your own career — five posts in, you look like someone actively working, not just a profile that's been sitting there since signup - Other members see it and remember you when a collab or referral comes up What to write about (pick one, don't overthink it): - A recent project breakdown — what you made, what tools, what actually took the time (pre-production, not just "I typed a prompt") - A win — new client, festival selection, a gig you landed - A lesson — something that didn't work and what you'd do differently - A hot take — where you think this medium is actually headed - A workflow reveal — your actual pipeline, start to finish Drop a draft in here if you want eyes on it before it goes up. Again, great real estate available.

Check out the films below to learn and enjoy AI filmmaking. What’s you pick?