Liu Haonan and Qiao Yuhang have been finishing each other’s stories since high school, where they drew together, talked about animation and film, and traded ideas for comics and stories of their own. More than a decade later, they’re doing something a two-person team couldn’t have pulled off a few years ago: building a science-fiction universe spanning 30 light years, almost entirely by themselves, using AI production tools instead of a film crew.
Hollywood has largely controlled who gets to tell stories at scale, largely because scale itself required budgets, crews and infrastructure most creators never had access to. A newer wave of AI production tools is starting to loosen that grip, and the companies building it are converging on Venice this year to make their case.
Chief among them is Tamar AI, a Palo Alto company building what it calls the creative infrastructure of the AI era: production tools, streaming platforms and IP incubation programs meant to carry an idea from concept through to an audience. Its flagship product, TapNow, is pitched as an AI-native creative operating system, bundling multimodal AI, intelligent agents and production workflows into one environment that the company says people use for everything from short films to marketing campaigns and presentations. TapNow says more than 3 million people use the platform daily, spread across 150 countries and regions, and runs a creator community, TapTV, alongside an events arm, TapTV Arena, that has staged more than 30 international hackathons, residencies and creator summits.
