Before Yves Bergquist was a director at USC's Entertainment Technology Center and a key artificial-intelligence guru for major studios, he was Alexis Debat, a tarnished national security expert and ABC News consultant who fled D.C. in scandal
"In this business, you're manufacturing and distributing and selling brain states," says Yves Bergquist, the director of artificial intelligence and neuroscience in media at the Entertainment Technology Center, Hollywood's low-profile, semi-secretive think tank. It operates out of USC's School of Cinematic Arts.
For many in the industry, Hollywood's brewing AI revolution has become an intriguing and anxious topic, defined on one end by Netflix's opaque audience data and on the other by producer Ryan Kavanaugh's notorious Relativity Media, which touted a magic algorithm for box office hits before its implosion. But Bergquist portrays himself as an incrementalist.
"Should I have blown my brains out?" Bergquist says when asked about his secret past. "Was that the right thing to do? Or was the right thing to do to move forward and become a better person and try to rebuild my life?" "A lot of the commentary was, 'He's a con man,' " he says, explaining that the description is unfair. "It's to say, 'This guy is constitutionally a liar and constitutionally a fraud' versus 'This guy did some really sleazy stuff.' "
Bergquist learned that his past would follow him. "I didn't start out telling people," he says, explaining that after he was quickly promoted at Singularity , someone wrote an anonymous letter to his superiors, "and they fired me. My son was a week old." At that point he took his wife's surname and, he says, resolved to be more up-front about his checkered history. After a period in the consulting wilderness, he was hired at L.A.
Corto's clients license its products. Bergquist won't specify those clients' names, except to say that they include some of the sponsors of the think tank. He notes that the firm is still in "early-stage mode" and self-financed. "Corto and ETC have discussed the possibility of some type of equity grant or licensing arrangement should any of the ETC research be commercialized," Bergquist explains.
In recent years, multiple board seats have been held by executives at subsidiaries of Disney. Now the media company was unknowingly funding Bergquist again. Asked about this, Williams says, "It wasn't something I gave a lot of consideration to." Disney didn't return a request for comment.
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