Netflix discloses $587 million acquisition of Ben Affleck's AI startup

Netflix just confirmed in an SEC filing that it paid $587 million in cash for Ben Affleck's 16 person AI startup. That's about $37 million per employee. And the model is the least valuable thing they bought. Affleck's logic, in his own words, was that public video models were trained on his peers' films, and he didn't think that was a real business. You can't sell studios a tool their own lawyers would sue over. So InterPositive raised money, spent 8 months shooting its own dataset on a controlled stage, and used that footage only for late-stage training, so output hits real production standards instead of demo-reel quality. Then comes the part Netflix actually paid for. Each new film fine-tunes a private model on its own dailies. The production keeps the footage and keeps the weights.…