DeepMind Goes to Hollywood
Things I Saved - 06/26/26
Welcome to Things I Saved. Each week I share some links I saved, along with thoughts on the news, platform shifts, strange incentives, and emerging formats shaping the future of entertainment and culture.
Good morning! This week: A24 is working with DeepMind, Figma is trying to make agents useful for design, Instagram wants your TV, and Netflix wants to make your phone ring. Also, in his one year Substack anniversary post, Derek Thompson said that subscriptions “scale with deep factual reporting and the ability to unearth information that might be useful to investors or anybody who follows markets.” I like that and I like markets. I also realized you can embed ticker symbols (like this one META 0.00%↑) in Substack posts, which is fun. So in an effort to be more useful, I’m doing that below (not investment advice, obviously).
Let’s get into it…
Google DeepMind is partnering with indie movie studio and hitmaker A24. This should come as no surprise to those who have been following A24’s recent moves closely. In early 2025 the company hired Adobe’s former Chief Strategy Officer, Scott Belsky, to lead A24 Labs, a special division dedicated to building custom AI-powered creative tools tailored specifically to filmmakers. Google’s DeepMind researchers should benefit from exposure to A24’s staff and talent—frontier AI models excel at coding largely due to the fact that it’s verifiable, a program either runs or it doesn’t. Depending on your artistic sensibilities, these models aren’t quite as good when applied in less verifiable fields (like filmmaking) that involve creativity and aesthetic judgment. But not for long… See Belsky’s recent post on X, “we’ll know emerging tech like AI is truly accelerating human creativity when we are able to control and shape the tools more than they control and shape us. lots of research ahead, especially around how these tools augment/enhance existing workflows vs. replace them.” GOOG 0.00%↑
Figma announced new agent-powered design tools. Many have said the collaborative design platform has been too slow to embrace AI tools and agents. Figma has struggled in public markets since its IPO last July. Also, remember the failed Adobe acquisition? I think this struggle is temporary, and mostly has to do with what I mentioned above: it’s hard to make models and AI harnesses that are skilled at all the non-verifiable stuff that people do. Like design! Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field said just as much at his keynote this week at the company’s yearly design conference Config. Interestingly, Cursor’s Head of Design Ryo Lu came to the same conclusion at their conference this week. In his excellent and inspiring talk, Lu said “Does the tool bring me closer to the truth, or push me further away?” There’s something in the air. FIG 0.00%↑ ADBE 0.00%↑ SPCX 0.00%↑
So your music helped train an AI music model. Artist Mat Dryhurst offers a useful summary of the state of music as it relates to the concerns of the majority of artists and musicians who aren’t completely agent-pilled. I share his position: “No cavalry is coming. This is something we will have to deal with, and it may not be so bad so long as we can at least be on the same page about what our options are. So rather than getting upset about the potentially lost cause of training data, maybe this is a time to think about what you want the world to look like, factoring we will live with increasingly powerful AI models at our fingertips, should we choose to use them.”
The post agent business. Ultimately, no one really knows where all this (AI) is headed. The business models that will define the next 100 years haven’t been invented yet. While many quibble over whether AI is guzzling up all the world’s water (it’s not), the most curious among us are getting their hands dirty and trying to predict, if not shape, the future. Justin Woodbridge and Yoni Rechtman give glimpse of what this future might look like saying: “The post-agent company should be focused on as efficiently and swiftly as possible vacuuming up what is going to be scarce at the end-game: context, attention, trust and brand to produce sustainably differentiated outcomes via network effects.”
Grey Ocean Strategy. Another group thinking about what comes next is NEMESIS. Their latest essay suggests it might become advantageous to lean into friction, pain, inefficiency, illegibility: “In a sense positioning is everything. In a world where fundamentals or ground truth are irrelevant, or at the least negotiable, where a thing sits, what narrative it’s part of, what associative cluster it finds itself in is all that matters (look at Liquid Death). But it’s also nothing, as most positional advantages are so easy to replicate and crowd out.”
Music industry marketing genius Steve Stoute on David Senra’s Podcast. Among the many highlights of this very excellent interview, Stoute talked about a commercial he made for Reebok with Allen Iverson and Jadakiss. He wanted Hype Williams, the famed music video director, to shoot it. But everyone pushed back. How could a music video director possibly make a successful TV commercial? Stoute wholeheartedly rejects the dichotomy. It’s all the same: entertainment, content, advertising, whatever you want to call it. The only difference is the context. A music video can be a commercial if it plays between TV shows, and a TV commercial can be a music video if it runs on MTV. Stoute says people are better off if they can accept this simple fact.
Instagram is testing Longform, Episodic Storytelling on its TV app. TV is back? Horizontal video is back? Instagram VP of product Tessa Lyons said TV was “the next frontier” for the app. Lyons also called out the emerging popularity of microdramas, which I covered last week. I wouldn’t be surprised if we continue to hear more about shortform vertical video burnout with users seeking out more prestige (longform, horizontal) formats as a result. In other news, the company is reportedly developing a standalone prediction market app in an effort to capture some of Polymarket and Kalshi’s attention. META 0.00%↑
Netflix announces UNHINGED, a new immersive game experience. Netflix has been trying to sneak its way into the games industry since at least 2017 with their series of “interactive specials” which included Black Mirror: Bandersnatch among others. Many of these have since been taken offline while the company pivoted to “actual games” including GTA: San Andreas and Squid Game: Unleashed (Netflix seems to like titles with colons). UNHINGED is interesting because it’s more “interactive special” than “actual game.” Netflix’s announcement explains: “The real-world movements on your phone track with Ava’s hands in the game, allowing you to guide her flashlight through the shadows. The immersion goes a step further with audio. When Ava receives a call or text, your actual phone rings, vibrates, and plays the audio directly through its speaker, while the rest of the environmental sound effects boom through your TV.” NFLX 0.00%↑
Images I Saved
