Image2 Ate the Week while Anthropic Locked the Door.
... still wondering if robots have celluloid dreams.
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Edited by Elizabeth Kealoha. Pod + Images by Ant Neely.
Sunday Edition
OpenAI dropped GPT Image 2 mid-week and the group chat immediately split into two camps: people who think the magic is back, and people who think the edge is already gone. Meanwhile, Anthropic quietly cut Claude Code access for new $20/month users without telling anyone, DeepSeek shipped V4 with another round of architecture tricks, and Tim Cook handed Apple to John Ternus on his way to executive chairman.
Also this week: Seedance IP Bingo got a leaderboard, Adobe got a strongly-worded review, and Gen Talks finally moved to Substack Live and tripled its audience.
Let’s get into it.
🏆 COMMUNITY WINS
A lot of MC folks out in the world this week.
A loaded week for member work and recognition.
Danny Ratcliff — Named Webby Honoree for short film Goodbye at Webbys 30
Mehul Agarwal — Launched filmarena.ai, a benchmarking arena for image and video models
Leonardo — Published Why I’m Bullish on OpenAI on aicoe.fit
Francesco D’Isa — New piece for The Bunker on language models, the brain, and fMRI-based decoding
Michelle Gold — Released a new music video built end-to-end in Flik with Seedance, with Suno integration via in-Flik agent loops
SPONSORED
The Fairground Reimagined Competition is live
Pick something from the public domain. Reimagine it as a 3+ minute AI film. That’s the brief from our friends at Fairground, and there’s over $10K on the line, plus distribution on their FAST channel and connected TV partners for the winners.
Submissions close May 1. Winners announced May 13.
THIS WEEK IN ‘COMMUNITY’
GPT Image 2 Launches and Eats the Image Gen Conversation
OpenAI’s gpt-image-2 dropped Tuesday during a live stream and the chat lit up. Mehul previewed it the day before, citing 1,000-person internal testing where it “easily beat” Nano Banana. Once it was live, Mike pushed back with a clear ranking: GPT Image 2 ahead of Nano Banana Pro, NB Pro ahead of NB2. Squid liked the multi-option generations. Minh hit rate limits in ten minutes (”GPU constrained”) and noted Image2 keeps getting stuck in loops referencing prior images in chat — meaning serious work still wants node-based control. The takeaway, in Minh’s words: “feels like the magic is back, but the edge is gone.”
[BASECAMP]
Where Are All the Chinese Image Models?
Inside the Image2 thread, Minh raised a sharper question: Chinese AI absolutely dominates video and is closing in on coding and LLMs — but image gen? Crickets. Mike and Louie counterpunched with names — Qwen, Ernie, Adam v2, Kolors, GLM, Mystic Labs — and Louie made the case Ernie beats Nano Banana for photorealism and it’s free. The arena rankings still show very few Chinese models near the top, but the room mostly agreed those benchmarks are “who-made-them” suspect anyway. Flux got dragged (”Nothing is as bad as Flux”), then defended for speed and customization. Healthy chaos.
[BASECAMP]
Anthropic Quietly Pulls Claude Code From New $20 Users
A trending X dumpster fire pulled the chat in: Anthropic removed Claude Code access for new $20/month subscribers with no announcement, then claimed it was a “small 2% test” — except they updated the docs to match and users hit it consistently. Leonardo’s piece Why I’m Bullish on OpenAI dropped the same day and didn’t pull punches: Anthropic’s mindshare is “out of sync” with OpenAI’s latest releases and the open-weight momentum. Minh wondered aloud if the real story is a compute crunch: “i do think one of the problems Anthropic might be facing is a compute problem and it’s possible Dwarkesh was right.”
[WELOVEROBOTS]
DeepSeek V4 Lands — But Does It Matter in the Agents Era?
DeepSeek V4-Pro shipped with two new tricks the room cared about: sparse attention and manifold-constrained hyper-connections. Leonardo argued the real impact won’t be the benchmarks but other labs (Moonshot, Zhipu) adopting the methods. Minh wasn’t sure: when R1 dropped, reasoning was the revelation — but we’re in an agents era now, and “literally anyone could build an agent.” Early arena rankings put V4 behind Kimi and GLM. The most interesting downstream theory came from Minh: if Huawei can keep DeepSeek running during ChatGPT or Claude downtime, the shock isn’t to model leaderboards — it’s to Nvidia.
[WELOVEROBOTS]
The Markiplier Model and the End of the Studio Stack
Michelle posted a Tubefilter piece on Markiplier’s Iron Lung YouTube release and made a sharp call: this — not the studios — is the portal to the future of entertainment. She drew the line back to Twin Peaks: The Return on Showtime: the audience pre-paid because they loved Lynch and they loved Twin Peaks. Same playbook here, fan-funded and creator-owned. The thread connected to Ant’s earlier distribution question (a mini-studio rep told him post-YouTube films struggle to chain into other distribution) and to news that MrBeast is plotting a move into AI-native entertainment. Brogan summed up the future: “Mr Beast: ‘first person who can make an AI short film that makes someone in the audience cry gets 1 million dollars!’”
[BASECAMP]
What It Actually Costs to Ship with Seedance 2.0
While Seedance IP Bingo was being played over in Basecamp, Cheikh Rôõney posted a full teardown of his Seedance 2.0 action short in WeLoveRobots — the receipts version. His pipeline: Freepik for assets, Gemini Pro for the script layout, NanoBanana Pro for image staging, ChatGPT for the timeline breakdown, Seedance for animation and dialogue, Premiere for the edit. Cost: about $45. His satisfaction on dialogue and acting: 70%, which he called “already a strong performance.” When a member asked how to budget a wolf short film before diving in, Cheikh walked him through the whole workflow.
His sign-off: “The real question is no longer ‘Can AI do this?’ but ‘What can we create with it?’”
[WELOVEROBOTS]
SPONSORED
Festivals and Screenings…
Altera Festival — Closing 4/30
Austin AI Film Fest — opens 4/15
TED AI Vienna — submissions open
AI International Film Festival extended its submission deadline (use code machinecinema at filmfreeway.com/aiinternationalfilmfestival). Around 15 wins for MC folks already.
EVENTS & MEETUPS
Cannes Lions is on the community radar — a few members are heading.
🔗 This Week’s Link Drops
Industry News
Tim Cook to Become Apple Executive Chairman; John Ternus to Become CEO — Apple Newsroom
MrBeast Plots Move Into AI-Native Entertainment — Business Insider
YouTube Rolls Out AI Deepfake Detection Tool — The Hollywood Reporter
Sandra Bullock Urges Embracing AI Trailers for Practical Magic 2 — The Movie Blog
Vercel Confirms Breach — AI COE
Roblox AI Assistant Gets Agentic Tools — TechCrunch
Google DeepMind Hires Philosopher — Perplexity
Tools & Tech
GPT Images 2.0 Explained — AI COE (Leonardo)
filmarena.ai — Mehul Agarwal’s image/video model benchmarking arena
DeepSeek V4-Pro Technical Paper — Hugging Face
free-claude-code — Use OpenRouter or local models with Claude Code
Flipbook — Worth a look
AI Filmmaking
Markiplier’s Iron Lung and the YouTube Indie Model — Tubefilter
The Ritual — Built Entirely With AI — Javed Hussain Shiekh
Esmeralda — Bella Ciao — Leonid Godik
Worth Watching/Resources
Why I’m Bullish on OpenAI — Leonardo, AI COE
AI Can Now Read Minds (Almost) — Francesco D’Isa, The Bunker
Albert Cheng on AI in Filmmaking — LinkedIn
BUILD WHILE THEY RESHUFFLE
This week the giants reshuffled. Tim handed off Apple. Anthropic locked a door. OpenAI pulled the rug out from under everyone’s image gen workflow. DeepSeek shipped a model in a week the West will spend a quarter analyzing.
While they squabbled, members shipped: a Webby honoree, a benchmarking arena, a music video built in agents, three articles, and a Gen Talks that tripled its audience the day it switched platforms. As Minh put it this week — Machine Cinema is a Lego set, and we have to fire every brick carefully in the kiln.
So fire yours. Make something this week.
See you next Sunday.
— Machine Cinema Newsletter