One question — what's the limit? — answered in forty seconds of film for the platform benchmarking AI against humanity.

Client
Intelligence
Type
Launch Film
Deliverables
Concept, Script, Archival Production, Post-Production, Original Score
Year
2026
Overview

Intelligence runs Design Arena, where 5.6 million people across 190+ countries put the world's best AI models head to head — code, image, video, audio, games, slides. The frontier labs it measures now reference it in their own model announcements.

Backed by Y Combinator, Index Ventures, and Conviction, they weren't launching a product. They were claiming a category: intelligence. The film had to name it.

Deliverables
'The Ratio' — the history of the gap between question and answer.
01

One Measurement, Five Eras

Every era of human progress measured the same way: input, wait, output. Letterpress, telegraph, typewriter, digital, AI — centuries of shrinking wait compressed into forty seconds.

02

Format as Timeline

The frame itself ages: aspect ratio widens era by era, black-and-white holding until the turn — then color, when the ratio breaks.

03

The Trace Layer

Live measurement overlays annotate history as it plays — input, output, limit — the company's obsession drawn directly onto the archival record.

04

The Drop

'Limit' recurs through the film until it flips to '?' at the turn. The original score breaks with it.

The trace layer measuring input, output, and limit over archival footage
Initial measurements
Further measurements
Switch Flipped
The drop — 'Limit' flips to '?' and the film breaks into color
Reactions
Succesful Launch
Ending Sequence

The Film

'The Ratio' — five eras of the gap between question and answer, cut to the moment the limit breaks.

Impact

The question became the category.

40 sec

To Name a Category

5.6M+

Users on the Platform

190+

Countries Reached

Next project
Simulants, Compared

What's the limit? The film asks. The platform exists to find out.