Making God Update [4th July 2025] - Geoffrey Hinton & Yoshua Bengio Interviews Secured, Funding Still Needed

Updates:

• We have secured interviews with two of the ‘Godfathers of AI’ - Prof. Geoffrey Hinton & Prof. Yoshua Bengio.

• We have wrapped our first 'leg' of production. We are now back in London to plan the rest (and largest part) of our filming in the UK, US, and Canada. We still have around 10-12 interviews to film.

• We now have a funding gap of just over $150,000. Please help us finish filming today by donating.

• Below we have some stills from our last shoot.

@AntonMakiievskyi sure can!

Total raised so far:
We’ve brought in £105,242.14 (≈ $139,922.58) across the last 12 months.

Break-down of where that came from:

• £28,000 from Greg over the last 12 months – paid for the all of our production kit and pre-production

• £6,174 from a private donor on 8 Mar 25 – covered the move to SF to start shooting and generating buzz, first month’s accom and car. Setting up Manifund and doing lower-production value shoots to prove a type of "proof of concept"

• £1,477.51 from Daniel F on 27 Mar 25

• £6,800 via Manifund on 14 Apr 25 – initial set of Manifund grants

• £20,539.70 via Manifund on 15 Apr 25

• £18,380 (21 Apr 25) and £18,312.50 (25 Apr 25) from a private donor

• £5,558.43 via Manifund on 12 May 25

On how much more we need to raise:

• ≈ $150 k to finish principal photography (8-10 more key interviews, UK shoots, LA reshoots, full crew each time).

• ≈ $351 k for post-production (roughly this will look like editor 15k, assistant 10k, colour 10k, sound 8k, motion-GFX 40k, archival 12k, composers 18k, rights 30k, Dir/EP 60k, misc/contingency 30k, deliverables 18k).

In short, we’re looking at another ~$500 k to get to a festival-ready master - cheap by Netflix-level documentary standards, but enough to hit that bar. And this is without the around $100k we imagine we will need to marketing and advertising.

What we spent:

Pre-Production – roughly $38 k (Mar 2024-Mar 2025)

• Bought first-wave kit (camera, lighting, sound, storage).

• Flights London to SF to start the project.

• Insurance, legal and other admin.

• Research, ideation, story work (two months of wages for me & Mike).

• SF accommodation for the first month.

Production-to-date – $102.7 k (Mar 2025-Now)

• Added a second camera plus extra lights and accessories.

• Travel: SF-NY flights, SF-LA drives, on-the-ground car hire for every interview/B-roll run.

• Six weeks of accommodation split across SF, NY and LA.

• Gary Marcus shoot in NYC (8-10-person crew over two days).

• Seven expert interviews in total (six of them shot one/two-man-band style when funds were tighter).

• 5 + hours of behind-the-scenes, plus ten public-vox-pop interviews.

• Admin, software subs (DocuSign, LLMs, Notion, etc.).

• Wages for Connor (EP) and Mike (Director).

That spending has gotten us about one-third of the doc!

Next we head back to the UK shortly for more interviews and BTS. While those are happening, we’ll keep fundraising through the summer, then return to the US with a full crew for the remaining shoots and any reshoots.

Hopefully this helps!

@jeff3454 thanks for your donations! Can you please (if you'd like) email me on connor.axiotes@gmail.com - we'd love to say thanks.

@Austin thank you! We appreciate it.

@michaeltrazzi hey!

All in all just above $17,000. 9/10 people on set also included myself, Mike, Gary and our film photographer.

A Netflix shoot is usually minimum $20k, and we want our shoots to be at that level as our aim is to break into film festivals and then streaming services. That's why we had 4 cameras! (Three FX6s and one FX3).

So I would pay this price again though because we have something that is an intriguing interview and super cinematic looking. Which was our purpose with this documentary.

It was a particularly expensive shoot because:

• We had less than one week notice to sort the whole shoot and as we are in SF, fly over to NYC and hire a local crew.

• Because Gary Marcus was coming to NYC and no longer has an office here, we had to pay for a filming location (when hitherto we've been using people's offices and homes).

• Our AirBnB was expensive because there was a chance we might have had to house crew and do some b-roll filming there, so it had to suit both those things.

• We had to ship extra luggage on our flights.

I will note that I've been quite successful at getting price reductions on things like crew and gear hire. And I'll continue to fight for value. Mike is also quite experienced with these bigger shoots so he has a good intuition for what should cost what.

Regarding the burn, we also raised $50,000 privately in the last few weeks. So although the interview a significant cost, we thought it was worth it. BUT to finish the documentary we still need to raise a lot.

Michael you should come help us fundraise aha! We could use your expertise.

[Costings below if you'd like a look!]

'Making God' Update [12th May 2025] - Gary Marcus Interview, NYC

***Watch our exclusive teaser clip of the interview on X/Twitter and LinkedIn***

We spent the last couple weeks in New York and hired a full crew (around 9/10 people on set) to film a professional cinematic interview with Gary Marcus.

@Connoraxiotes David "Duvenaud" Former Anthropic Team Lead it should have said.

‘Making God’ Update [13.04.25]

High-Level Summary:

• We spent the last couple weeks on filming for our “Proof of Concept” - to show funders of the quality of our documentary.

• We have conducted 5 cinematic interviews among civil society, unions, legal experts, and AI experts. We have provided stills, but it should be noted they are yet to be fully edited. But they do give an indication of style and high quality.

• In order to increase the likelihood of film festival acceptance and streaming service acquisition thereafter, we need additional funding over the next two months to hire a full production team and gear. Mike filmed these interviews by himself and I (Connor) interviewed.

• Next steps: edit up these 5 interviews to show as our Proof of Concept video; hire full production team for new shoots and reshoots where necessary; get more great interviews; continue fundraising.

For the last two weeks, we have conducted 5 interviews, and have more in the schedule for the next couple weeks.

1) Prof. Rose Chan Loui is the Founding Executive Director, Lowell Milken Center on Philanthropy and Nonprofits at UCLA.

• We went to UCLA for a conference on AI and Nonprofits, and later filmed Rose in her family home. As we entered her home we met her Husband and her two dogs. Rose beamed at us and showed us into her office, hoping we wouldn’t find it too messy. It wasn’t!

• When we sat down to interview, Rose spoke to us about: her work in nonprofits; being dragged into the AI conversation through her legal background; the history of OpenAI as a nonprofit; Delaware Public Benefit Corporations and Anthropic; Sam Altman’s firing and OpenAI board hopes and worries; the worries she has for her family around the development of AGI.

• On 3 separate 80,000 Hours podcasts she amassed millions of views for her expertise on AI lab nonprofit structures.

2) Prof. Ellen Aprill is Senior Scholar in Residence and taught Political Activities of Nonprofit Organizations at UCLA in 2024.

• Ellen retired last year but came back to UCLA to work at the center focused on nonprofits. Like Rose, she’d been dragged into the world of AI and is worried about its implications for the world. As we turned up to her drive, Ellen ushered us into her family home. We were briefly introduced to her husband, Sunny, a retired lawyer, Ellen asked if we didn’t mind setting up as she called a student and went through their work. Even after retiring it seemed Ellen hadn’t lost her enthusiasm to teach and support.

• Ellen spoke to us in her home office about: the incorporated missions of nonprofits; valuing nonprofit AI research labs; her worries about the future; and her optimism about humanity.

3) Holly Elmore is the Executive Director of Pause AI US.

• She spoke to us in Dolores park at a leafletting session where her and other Pause AI volunteers gave their spare time to educate the public on risks from AI. The public seemed interested in what they had to say, but most smiled and carried on with their day. Holly and other volunteers spoke to us about the reason for protesting. Their solution to mitigating risks from AI is a ‘pause’ on the development of AI.

4) Eli Lifland is the Founding Researcher at the AI Futures Project, and a top forecaster.

• He spoke to us about: his work in forecasting the development of AI and in particular artificial super intelligence; a brief history of deep learning; what are LLMs?; his work on AI 2027 predicting when ASI might flood the remote job economy; his worries about AGI lab race dynamics; a race to the bottom on AI Safety; US-China race dynamics; his hopes that we slow down a bit to get this right; the burden of predicting possible catastrophe and the rest of the world being seemingly not aware and unprepared.

5) Heather-Rose is Government Affairs Lead in LA for Labor Union SAG-AFTRA.

• She spoke to us about her: political campaigning to educate Congressmen and Women on risks from AI; serves on SAG-AFTRA’s New Technology Committee, focusing on protecting actors' rights against AI misuse; she became interested in AI safety in 2020 and has since been advocating for regulations on AI-generated content and deepfakes; job loss concerns, too.

Civil Society

• We have also been interviewing the general public about their views on AI and their worries and hopes.

Upcoming Interviews

1. Cristina Criddle, Financial Times Tech Correspondent covering AI - recently broke the Financial Times story about OpenAI giving days long safety-testing rather than months for new models).

2. David Kokotajlo, Former Anthropic Team Lead.

3. John Sherman, Dads Against AI and podcasting.

Potential Interviews

1. Jack Clark (we are in touch with Anthropic Press Team).

2. Gary Marcus (said to get back to him in a couple weeks).

Interviews We’d Love

1. Kelsey Piper, Vox.

2. Daniel Kokotajlo, formerly OpenAI.

3. AI Lab employees.

4. Lab whistleblowers.

5. Civil society leaders.

Points to Note:

• The legal interviews focus on Sam Altman and OpenAI as the Professors are legal experts in the field of nonprofit reorganization. Future interviews will focus on other AGI labs, too. Like with the Eli interview, which focuses on the other players in the field.

• The stills are from interviews with a 1-man crew (just Mike, our Director). Future stills of future interviews will be even more cinematic with a full (or even half) crews. This is what we need the immediate next funding for.

Austin has set up a really great atmosphere here at Mox, and was welcoming and helpful every time I visited.