Interviewer: Hello and welcome to The AI Summit London, and we’re delighted to be joined today by Josh Liss, Head of GTM, Media and Entertainment at NebiusThank you so much for your time.

Josh: It is a pivotal moment. Earlier today I spoke about how it takes a series of evolutions to reach a revolution. We have now arrived at that revolution in filmmaking at the intersection of AI and film. One of our customers and close partners, Higgsfield, has released a full feature length film made entirely with AI, and it debuted at Cannes this year to great attention. Film makers who had never used AI saw it and said this is real and it has soul. It is a fascinating moment for the history of filmmaking and for the relationship between AI and media and entertainment.

We have been collaborating with Higgsfield for some time. They have been customers of ours since 2024 and are among the most innovative companies in the world. Our machine learning engineers partnered with them to help bring this vision to life, enabling their platform to create this first feature length film. It has just premiered, and we were pleased to share with the audience what it means.

Interviewer: Could you compare the production costs and timeline for a film made this way with a traditional film, and what that shift means for the content creation industry?

Josh: This was a ninety five minute science fiction fantasy film. A traditional production of that scope might cost around 50 million dollars. In the traditional studio system, getting a film of that scale made is complex and difficult. Many great scripts never see the light of day because the cost threshold is so high and budgets are limited.

This film cost about 500,000 dollars instead of 50 million. A film like this would normally take a minimum of two years to move from script to screen. They made it in two weeks. So you are looking at roughly one hundredth of the cost and about a fiftieth of the time. Those numbers are extraordinary and they matter for creators.

Interviewer: What does that mean for storytellers and creative teams?

Josh: It opens a new level of capability. Storytellers can take their visions and turn them into reality. I spoke to a creative director here at the summit who always wanted to make a film but never thought it would be possible. Not only is it possible, she made a short film and it screened at a festival last month. Stories like hers are inspiring. Higgsfield’s platform, powered on Nebius B300 GPUs from NVIDIA in our data centres, helped make this possible. It is the beginning of a filmmaking revolution.

Interviewer: Two weeks is an extraordinary turnaround. What kind of infrastructure does it take to produce a film on that timescale, given traditional production often spans years from idea to screen? How do you compress that to two weeks in the AI era?

Josh: The scale of video generation is the headline. At this level it is far more complex than simply prompting and getting a response, but there were 100,000 unique video generations across the two week period. Each generation was about fifteen seconds long. That is roughly 7,000 generations per day, which averages to about five per minute. On paper that implies more than sixty seconds of video produced for every minute of clock time, which shows the extent of parallel generation and the transformational implications for the edit.

Traditionally, editors review daily footage over weeks, which is very labour intensive. Now multiply that volume many times over. You need AI to help teams synthesise the material and shape it into a cohesive story. That requires innovative platforms, thoughtfully built from the ground up, to coordinate generation, review, curation and editorial decision making at speed and scale.

Interviewer: Beyond film, are you seeing similar AI driven innovation across the media industry?

Josh: Yes. This is a leading example, but there are other areas where similar innovation is unlocking new possibilities.

In video, advertising will change significantly. Historically, agencies and brands plan campaigns, shoot on set, and work with fixed material after the fact. Social platforms now provide immediate signal on what performs. If something resonates, you can create thousands of generations and derivatives of that idea and keep iterating in near real time. It lets advertisers deliver more of what audiences respond to.

In audio, there is fascinating work in AI generated music. What excites me even more is AI models that watch video and compose a musical score that aligns perfectly with what they see. For visual effects, commercial shoots and content creators, crafting the right soundtrack is a lot of work. Being able to customise it dynamically is uniquely valuable.

The last area, and perhaps the most consequential in the long term, is the emergence of world models. Think of gravity. We can act however we like but we cannot break the rules of gravity. World models are similar in an AI environment. There is a set of rules that governs what is possible, and everything else reacts dynamically to our actions. It is a new engine for content creation and for games. The experience space has near infinite possibilities. This matters for gaming, television and advertising, and it has major implications for robotics.

Imagine building a world with dragons on Mars in the year 2300. You define the constructs and details of that world. What happens next is dynamic to your interactions in that space. You could film it and turn it into a show, stream it with others, or create a micro game so people can inhabit it. The possibilities are expansive. It takes companies like Nebius to provide the infrastructure, the software layer and a robust foundation so the most innovative experiences can exist. I am fortunate to work at the leading edge of where this is going and to help bring these experiences to market responsibly.

Closing

Josh Liss commercialises radical innovation. As Head of GTM, Media and Entertainment, he bridges the gap between AI laboratory “magic” and global commercial reality. 

He leads strategy across specialised labs and AI native pioneers that are defining the future of gaming, advertising, content creation and distribution.