The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

The director is about to become a father and asks a question: what kind of world will his child be born into. He travels around the people working on artificial intelligence and asks them the same thing. The answers he gets are diametrically opposed. Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell direct. It runs one hour and forty three minutes. The documentary is in three parts. First those expecting catastrophe speak; then those who believe the technology will solve the world's problems; and last the people running the companies leading the race. Among those speaking are Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Emily M. Bender and the Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio. The method is to take no side, presented not as a claim to balance but as helplessness; the word in the title comes from there. The strongest section is the interviews with the executives. The same people acknowledge the size of the risk and accelerate the race, and the documentary does not cut the contradiction. It screened at Sundance on 27 January 2026 and opened in cinemas on 27 March 2026. Its limit is technical depth. How the models work is passed over quickly and the argument rests largely on people's predictions. Who it is for: anyone following the argument about artificial intelligence and viewers who like topical documentary. Who it is not for: there is little technical explanation, the narrative leans hard on its personal frame, and the balance between speakers does not hold everywhere.