The Gifted, a short by Jeff Synthesized that GamesBeat describes as an AI film, has won the grand prize of the Future Vision XPRIZE, a $3.5 million competition for hopeful science fiction. The result was announced on stage at Moonshots Live in Los Angeles. The film is about a boy who rebuilds his late mother from her texts, voice and diary, and a revived mother who never gives orders but only asks.
The prize includes $2.5 million of equity investment towards a full-length feature, with Range Media Partners and Google's 100 Zeros initiative supporting development and production, plus $100,000 in cash for the screenplay. Republic Film will run a public campaign letting fans invest in the feature.
The Gifted also topped the Snap-backed audience award, decided by public head-to-head votes across all 65 official selections, and took $50,000. Voters were shown two films at a time and asked which future they would rather live in, ranked Elo-style. Four runners-up got $100,000 each, with premises ranging from a chef who cannot taste befriending a Martian to a plan to fly Earth out of the solar system, and each of the top ten films received $20,000 from SandboxAQ.
More than 2,500 trailers and treatments were entered. The five finalists were judged by a panel that included Neil deGrasse Tyson, Neal Stephenson, Google's Mira Lane and Rod Roddenberry, with Salesforce as presenting sponsor.
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