Apparently they cast the wrong lead in Good Will Hunting because the hidden genius was Ben Affleck. The actor, who sold his AI filmmaking startup to Netflix for $587 million earlier this year, made headlines this week after demonstrating his understanding of AI technology, neural networks, machine learning, and more in multiple video clips from recent interviews.
He can also write a little Python, he says.
The movie star delved into his interest in technology on this week’s episode of GQ’s “One More Question” series. There, he began humbly by saying, “I’ve been interested in computers since I was young,” and then went on to talk at length about the development of AI as it relates to filmmaking, using AI terminology such as machine learning, neural networks, transformers, tensors, GPUs, and inference.
In the viral video, Affleck explains to impressed interviewer Zach Barron that he got into the field when analog film gave way to digital. As he spoke, he kept defining terms to help the interviewer understand what he was talking about.
“I became more interested in that aspect, and over the years visual effects workflows have incorporated machine learning,” Affleck began. “So you can write pretty crappy Python scripts and stuff like that, because with a convolutional neural network, it’s kind of a precursor to what a transformer can do, it just does more computations at the same time. For example, we look at something called a tensor. A tensor is just a numerical transformation of a visual image with numbers like batch number, frame number, red, green, blue value for each pixel in each frame. And how many? That’s pretty simple, right?
No, Ben Affleck, it’s not that simple. That’s why this video is going viral.
Next, the attackers explained how to use neural networks to identify patterns and perform edge detection and feature extraction. “It’s enough to identify the pattern. For example, we have a window ledge here, so we can more easily take the green screen image and replace it with something.”
He also admitted that he sometimes used his status as a Hollywood star to get a glimpse of emerging AI technology. In another clip, Affleck said OpenAI was among the places he visited, and that he ended up understanding how he could become more directly involved in the AI field.
As the interviewer continued, Affleck explained how AI will help filmmaking, not replace it, and how it will lead to the development and sale of his own startup in this field. (He insisted the $587 million figure was “incorrect,” pointing out that he did not own the entire company.)
“We bet on the idea that in order to do this in an ethical way, and to do this in a way where we could take this technology and actually work with artists in this community, we needed to create our own datasets because there are very fixed and long-term relationships around things like likeness,” he said. “So I raised the money. I spent about eight months filming with a lot of cameras and a lot of equipment to create a dataset that acts as late-stage training for the open model to do individual tasks. The training code and the inference code are related to each other and are geared towards actual, specific tasks that create value,” Affleck said.
In another clip that also went viral, Affleck spoke with Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw at the Screen Time 2026 conference in Los Angeles and talked about how he fine-tuned an AI model by taking an open source model, unfreezing the weights, and teaching it to meet specific movie standards. In the process, filmmakers keep their work unique while benefiting from the learnings that come from training their own models for the movies they’re making.
The actor used the technology in his film Animals, where AI assisted in the post-production process.
At one point, he also weighed in on concerns surrounding AI and its world-ending potential. But his concerns were more reasonable.
“When I worry about AI, I worry about the kids in school. I worry about the 30% increase in the number of A’s being given in universities in the last three years. I worry about learned helplessness. I worry about responsible use. I don’t worry about Skynet. I don’t think Skynet will take over the[movie]business in any meaningful way. It’s going to be additive,” Affleck said.
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