Artificial was a film. A real film, and an almost finished film. It looked at the meteoric rise of ChatGPT creators OpenAI, and dug into the personal rivalries, ego clashes, and ethical tensions behind the scenes. It would have done for AI what The Social Network did for Facebook.
It was also practically finished. Done. In the can.
Then Amazon invested an unbelievable $50 billion in OpenAI, and suddenly they lost their appetite for a movie that would dig too deeply into the background of something they had just pumped serious cash into.
The cast of Artificial includes Andrew Garfield as current CEO Sam Altman, Yura Borisov as machine learning engineer Ilya Sutskever, and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk. It co-stars Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Zosia Mamet, Chris O’Dowd, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd, Jason Schwartzman, and Mark Rylance.
As I said, a serious film, with a serious cast. And a serious director in the form of Luca Guadagnino.
While out promoting The Magic Faraway Tree, lead Andrew Garfield has clearly chosen his words carefully when asked Amazon’s decision to abandon the project. Speaking with Variety, he said:
“I was, and I wasn’t surprised,” they were nothing but supportive and nothing but encouraging while we were making the film. There are certain things that fit certain places and don’t fit other places.”
Sensible moderation. He also said both he and Guadagnino still have a good relationship with Amazon executives, and that overall he is thankful the studio helped the film land somewhere more suitable. NEON have picked up the $40 million-budgeted film, and Artificial could be an awards contender with a times run in the fall.
