Good Bye 2025 and 2026 Year Plans
Learn more. Create more. Play more.
Last December, we had our year end town hall with the community, over 60 people came together to talk about how we saw the last few years and how we want to work on the new year
The last two years at Machine Cinema have been nothing short of a maelstrom. What started in backyards and living rooms has become a global movement in a way we never expected and it’s been incredible for us, Fred and Minh. So as the year comes to an end, we’d like to take this moment to reflect on an amazing year and look forward optimistically at the year ahead of us.
But for those of you just now tuning in, Machine Cinema is an events series, education network, membership community, a collective, advocacy group, software suite, and content accelerator. Since 2024, we’ve grown from a dozen curious AI filmmakers and creators in Los Angeles to a community of over 20k people around the world.
2023 - Origins
Machine Cinema really started because of Dalle3. Fred Grinstein and I were working on another media project, ruminating on what to do next as the cinders of web3 and crypto cooled to ash. And we recognized immediately that something was afoot. The day ChatGPT3.5 dropped, the world changing felt like a foregone conclusion.
As we immersed in this new world of technology and possibilities, the light bubble went off when we saw that people were actually starting to make movies and tell stories. As we evolved our point of view on this new horizon line, the first thought we had was that the space needed its own Siskel and Ebert.
In July 2023, we started Machine Cinema shortly after this, by making shorts and vlogs of us commentating on the latest AI short films coming out from amazing creators like Karen X Cheng, Paul Trillo and Shy Kids.
This was a new movement, and it needed voices to interrogate what was happening. In the midst of this, we started hosting small events with our friends.
2024 - Experimentation
At first, they started out as casual hangs with friends, tinkering with the latest tool and then we started experimenting with something we call GenJams and GenBattles, events where we get friends together to create short films on the spot, its a hackathon combined with a mini film festival.
The initial instinct to observe and comment and report evolved into what we call AIRL, taking the experience of this new technology into real life, subverting the impression that it was making the creative process lonely. Recognizing the feeling that the experience of the film set seemed to be changing, we thought there was another way.
At a GenJam, the theme is Learn, Create, Play. We learn new tools, create films or games or videos with new friends, and then we watch or play them together. The format is perfect for people who want to jump into the emerging space and get to know where the tools are that day/week. But we didn’t arrive at that format by accident, in 2024, we organized 17 events, each time refining and improving the model until we arrived at the version that our community knows today.
By late 2024, we started branching out, organizing events in New York and San Francisco and in Los Angeles, expanding vertically, responding to what the community wanted, doing events where people can share AI shorts and bigger projects they were working on (Work In Progress Salon), more casual events where people can meet each other (Gen&Juice), and deep dive events where people can share their expertise (RoboDojo). We even did larger experiments like our Sloomoo After Dark event, where community leaders collaborated with a slime museum to create interactive AI exhibits!
By the summer of 2024, it was already clear this was a global movement. Creators from all over the world were producing amazing content and we wanted to see what was happening. We recognized that what we were seeing in LA, NY, and SF weren’t isolated. We’re all part of a global movement. Fred and I were lucky enough to head to Seoul with Story Protocol and Toronto for TIFF with AI LA and the AI on the Lot team. We couldn’t do it without the support of our partners at Fantastic Day, Affan Imran and Meg Button. For us, it was a peek into the amazing creators outside of the States and it got us dreaming about 2025.
2025 - Growth
In 2025, we started off with a bang, going to Sundance and getting a peek into the shifting tone of AI in the independent film community, which was getting increasingly curious. But that was just a calm before a storm. Can you believe in one year we organized over 150 events all over the world in over 30 countries? Our newsletter lept from just over a thousand to over 10k subscribers!
By February, we got really curious about what was happening abroad. People were inviting new amazing creators into our community who were experimenting on the bleeding edge and from all edges of the world: Lagos, Paris, Warsaw, Tokyo, etc. and we had to meet them.
It also so happened that this coincided perfectly with the evolution of the AI tool space. Things heated up: it was no longer a game for just Stability, Runway, Midjourney, DallE, and rumors of Sora. Luma, Pika, Black Forest Labs, LTX and the Chinese companies Kling, Hailuo, Alibaba, Bytedance and more entered the fray. A once fringe part of the multi-trillion dollar LLM war became an extremely crowded and competitive space. Luckily for us, because of our mission to find and build an army of AI creators around the world, we got to work with a majority of these tools as they sought to access the amazing creators we knew and explore how their tools were being used in new markets.
2025 was a whirlwind. We hosted GenJams in some truly unique places. Rather than writing it all out, I’ll simply list the highlights so you can get a sense of everything we had the honor of doing this year:
Sundance Film Festival - 2 GenJams and a panel!
Aspen Institute – A GenJam in Washington, DC
AgencyJam – With McCann, Droga5, and Mischief
GenJams across Europe – Warsaw, Paris, London, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Milan, and Azerbaijan
Jams in Asia – Bangalore, Mumbai, Ho Chi Minh City, Tokyo, and Seoul
A GenJam in Lagos, Nigeria – Our first in Africa
A GenJam with the amazing Eliza McNitt
Influencer GenJam – Working with AI filmmakers and creators with over 1 million followers to produce social content
GenJam Game Edition – Creating games and video trailers
GenJam Meditation – Producing meditation videos and meditating to them together
Incredible partners – Google, OpenAI, ByteDance, Luma, Runway, Hailuo, Kling, Popcorn, and Hypernatural
GenJam 360 – Using AI to create 360-degree videos for a dome experience, experimenting with immersive AI
A mountain retreat – A place for people to rest, recuperate, and jam
We also started to experiment with more and more online efforts. Our newsletter slowly expanded to over ten thousand people. And the interesting thing about our newsletter is that we don’t write it! We have a massive community of over 2,000 people in our online community and we designed a custom AI process to anonymously extract the best conversations from our daily chatter and turned that into our newsletter! As a result, our newsletter is a fun and dynamic read on what is most important to our creative community, which inevitably touches on the most important debates in our space.
We also ramped up our efforts with our weekly live podcast we call GenTalks. Every week, we find people from all over the world using AI to create new things or even designin new AI tools and we have them come on to show us their latest work or something they’re building or thinking about. It’s a great read on what the top professionals are doing in the AI creative space. We also started RoboDojo, which is our effort to feature deep dives into cutting edge tools or workflows. Our friend Fred Graver came through and dove into his approach to using AI for writing.
And something that’s most important to our hearts has been designing our own software for AI creation. We couldn’t help ourselves. This is the era of building so we got to building. We built our own custom software for teaching and running GenJams, and we also started design mini-games, part of a larger experiment for us in getting more and more people co-create at the same time. Affan Imran, our head of partnership and operations sunk his teeth into building our amazing education tool, the Create app. These little experiments have been really fun windows into how we see group artistic creation.
I think 2026 is going to be even crazier.
2026 - Keystone
For us, in 2026, we want to be a lot more ambitious about what we are. As you can see, Machine Cinema has been fluid from the beginning and opportunistic about how we embrace the changes in AI along with our community. As a result, it’s hard to pin down exactly what we are: we’re in an event series, an education company, an AI entertainment company, a global movement, an AI consulting and integration company, a jobs channel, and a head hunting service. It’s a lot all at once with community being the backbone. We’ve done a lot of thinking and want to still continue supporting many of these things but offer a theme that characterizes the new season of 2026.
2024 was the season of experimentation, 2025 was the year of global growth, and 2026 we deem the keystone season. In 2024, we experimented with GenJams, refined the model, grew a small but fun and loyal base of friends willing to play. In 2025, we leaned into the world and grew our community far beyond our initial borders, getting a feel for what the global movement looked like up close and personal. And now, in 2026, we want to level all of that up and recommit to the community we love. This means:
Most Important: Leveling up what it means to support the members in our community and the larger AI community. Asking mainly what do they need and want?
Leveling up our partnerships, finding new ways to feature our partners and create new things with them
Diversifying our experiments beyond film to include games, microdramas, 3D, immersive, XR, and more.
Expanding our support of hubs, partners, and creators around the world.
For us, in particular, this means becoming more of a professional association that supports, leads, and advocates for AI creators around the world. We don’t want to say too much about what our exact plans are, but we just wanted to put it out there how we’re thinking about it and that we’re open to collaborate with everyone in the world of AI artistry, creation, filmmaking, gaming, and more.
The most humble and biggest gratitude from us, Minh and Fred. Thank you everyone so much for joining us on this journey and we look forward to playing more!