The Gifted Wins the Future Vision XPRIZE

JeffSynthesized's The Gifted won the Future Vision XPRIZE, a $3.5 million-plus competition for hopeful science fiction, announced live at Moonshots LIVE in downtown Los Angeles. It beat more than 2,500 trailers and treatments from about 40 countries, judged by a panel that included Neil deGrasse Tyson, Neal Stephenson, Google's Mira Lane and Rod Roddenberry, and it also took first place in the public-vote SPECS Audience Choice Award.

The prize is a path to a feature: a $2.5 million equity investment in the full-length film plus $100,000 for the screenplay, with Range Media Partners and Google's 100 Zeros initiative backing development and committed to helping raise another $12 million, and a public investment round through Republic. An AI-made trailer had been a pitch for years. Here it became the thing that financed the movie.