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Ben Affleck apparently has impressive knowledge of how AI works
Once you get past the surface-level celebrity of Ben Affleck, you come to realize that the Academy Award-winning actor, writer, and director is actually something of a genius. His latest musings on AI only further proved that fact.
Ben Affleck being a borderline genius is no secret. His ex-wife Jennifer Garner once described him as the “most brilliant person in any room.” He wrote an Academy Award-winning screenplay about trauma, psychology and mathematics at the age of 21 years old. He once famously and virally cooked Bill Maher on his own show during a geopolitical discussion.
The latest example of Affleck’s intelligence comes via an interview with GQ ahead of the release of his new film Animals.
Ben Affleck has a serious understanding of AI, goes viral for explaining how “convolutional neural networks” work
Earlier this year, InterPositive, the AI film technology company Affleck invested in, sold to Netflix for $587 million; its software trains on a production’s raw footage (dailies) to handle technical post-production tasks like relighting, wire removal, and background enhancements.
In his GQ interview, Affleck showed he wasn’t merely an investor, but was well-versed in AI technology. He also revealed that he used his celebrity status to get a look at the inner workings of OpenAI and Google.
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models
“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.
“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.
“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.
“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’
“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
— Fireside Alpha (@firesidealpha) October 6, 2026
Affleck’s latest movie Animals, which he directed and stars in, will hit Netflix on Friday, October 9. Affleck stars in the film as Milo Bradford, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose son is kidnapped, alongside Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson, Adriana Paz, Ray Fisher, Christopher Woodley, Matt Gerald, Jacob Estrada, Luis Gerardo Méndez, and Steven Yeun.
“When their son is kidnapped, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate and his wife find themselves drawn into a web of deception. As they scramble to raise the ransom payment, they’re forced to make choices that could tear their world apart.”