Apparently, the wrong actor was cast as the lead in "Good Will Hunting" — because it turns out Ben Affleck is the real secret genius. The actor, who earlier this year sold his AI filmmaking startup to Netflix for a reported $587 million, has gone viral this week after showing off his grasp of AI technology, neural networks, machine learning, and more across several clips from his recent interviews. He even claims he can write a bit of Python.

The movie star opened up about his passion for technology most recently on an episode of GQ's "One More Question" series this week. He humbly began with "I've always been kind of into computers since I was young," before diving deep into the evolution of AI as it applies to filmmaking, casually tossing around terms like machine learning, neural networks, transformers, tensors, GPUs, and inference.

In a clip that's circulating widely, Affleck tells an impressed interviewer, Zach Baron, that his interest began when analog film transitioned to digital. Throughout the conversation, he kept defining his terminology so the interviewer could follow along.

"I became more interested in that aspect of it, and the visual effects workflow for many years has included machine learning," Affleck explained. "So I can write, like, pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that. Because with convolutional neural networks — which were the sort of precursors to what the transformer can do — which is just much more computation simultaneously — you would do things like, look at what's called a tensor — which is just the numerical translation of a visual image, in numbers like the batch number, the frame number, the red, green, and blue values of each pixel in each frame, and how many. It's just that simple, right."

No, Ben Affleck, it is not just that simple — which is exactly why this video is going viral. The actor then explained how neural networks were used to identify patterns and perform edge detection or feature extraction, which he described as "identifying patterns enough to know — like this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green screen image out and replace it with something."

He also confessed that he sometimes leveraged his Hollywood fame to get a look at emerging AI technology. According to Affleck in a separate clip, OpenAI was among the places he visited, which ultimately helped him figure out how to get more directly involved in the AI space. As the interviewer continued, Affleck described how AI can assist with filmmaking rather than replace it, which led to the creation and sale of his own startup in the space. (He says the $587 million figure is "not right," pointing out that he didn't own the entire company.)

"I gambled on this notion that in order to do this in an ethical way and in a way that could take this technology and actually make it work hand in glove with artists in this community where there are very fixed, long-standing relationships around likeness and so forth, we had to create our own dataset," he said. "So I raised the money. I shot for about eight months with a lot of cameras and a lot of equipment, and created a dataset that would serve as late-stage training for open models to do discrete tasks, sort of where the training code, the inference code, were related to one another and geared toward actual specific tasks that would generate value," Affleck said.

In another clip that's also going viral, Affleck spoke with Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw at the Screentime 2026 conference in L.A., where he discussed how he fine-tunes AI models by taking open source models, unfreezing the weights, and then teaching them to meet specific cinematic standards. Through this process, the filmmaker keeps their proprietary work while benefiting from the learning that comes from training their own unique model for the movie they're making.

The actor applied this technique himself on his film "Animals," where AI contributed to the post-production process. At one point, he also addressed concerns about AI and its potential to end the world. His worries, however, were far more grounded.

"When I worry about AI, I worry about my kids in school. I worry about the 30% rise in the number of A's given out at colleges over the last three years. I worry about learned helplessness. I worry about responsible use. I don't worry about Skynet, and I don't think that it's going to take over [the movie] business in any meaningful way. I think it's going to be additive," Affleck said.