AI's New Frontier: How Liu and Qiao Are Rewriting the Rules of Storytelling

When Two Friends Dreamed of Worlds Beyond

Back in high school, Liu Haonan and Qiao Yuhang were more than just friends—they were creative partners. They'd spend hours drawing together, talking about animation and film, trading ideas for comics and stories. Fast forward over a decade, and those shared dreams have evolved into something truly extraordinary: a sci-fi universe spanning 30 light years, built entirely by two people using AI production tools instead of traditional film crews.

AI's Creative Revolution

Hollywood has long controlled who gets to tell stories at scale—because scale itself required budgets, crews, and infrastructure most creators never had access to. But now, a new wave of AI production tools is changing that dynamic, and this year's Venice Production Bridge is serving as their stage.

Enter Tamar AI and TapNow

Chief among these innovators is Tamar AI, a Palo Alto company building what it calls the creative infrastructure of the AI era. Their flagship product, TapNow, is pitched as an AI-native creative operating system, bundling multimodal AI, intelligent agents, and production workflows into one environment that people use for everything from short films to marketing campaigns.

"AI doesn't replace the filmmaker — it closes the gap between what you imagine and what you can see," says Tianshu, head of global AI product solutions at Alibaba Token Hub, one of TapNow's technology partners.

The 10,000 Parallel Universes Initiative

That philosophy fuels 10,000 Parallel Universes, TapNow's global creator and AI-native IP incubation program. Framed as an alternative to traditional producer-led development pipelines, the program aims to discover new voices and original stories from around the world.

Primordia: A Labor of Love

The standout project from this initiative is "Primordia," created by Liu and Qiao. The story revolves around a cluster of star systems they call the Ore, home to dozens of inhabited planets and a war over resources mined from ancient creatures. A frontier boy named Jesse rescues a fugitive military officer named Rook, and the bargain between them pulls both into empire, war and the secret of Jesse's own origins.

Qiao traces the appeal of AI filmmaking to scale as much as tools. "In the past, even a relatively small location shoot for a short film might involve 30 or 40 people," he says. "The director still had to handle a huge amount of organization, management and communication. Everyone would come to you asking what happened next, and your creative train of thought was constantly being interrupted." On "Primordia," he says, it's mainly the two of them, working through writing, shots and detail before moving into execution.

The Magic of AI Collaboration

Liu puts it in terms of where his time actually goes. "The reason I first wanted to move into AI filmmaking really was 'people,'" he says. "In traditional production, you sometimes spend less time with the work itself than you do dealing with people and logistical matters. With AI filmmaking, the work becomes the thing I spend the most time with." The pair chose a series format over the AI shorts that have become common online, betting that "Primordia's" characters and history needed more than 10 or 15 minutes to land.

Production runs through TapNow's own tools, including an agent system Liu uses to turn conversational shot descriptions, camera moves and blocking into instructions the underlying models can act on. Qiao says the creators lean on the same system to organize the world and screenplay, using it less as a decision-maker than a collaborator that offers structure and pushback on writing that still starts with them.

Reimagining Storytelling

"Primordia" is the clearest evidence for a broader claim: that AI tools don't just make filmmaking cheaper, they change who gets to run the experiment in the first place. It's an argument that 10,000 Parallel Universes is building its own streaming platform around, betting that AI can trade the traditional model of fewer, bigger-budget bets and longer production cycles for more creators, more experiments and more finished worlds moving through the pipeline at once.

HappyHorse's Role in the Magic

Some of that infrastructure runs through HappyHorse, the AI video generation model housed inside Alibaba Token Hub (ATH), the independent core business group Alibaba Group set up in March to bring together its foundation models, model services and AI applications under one roof. Rather than functioning as a finishing tool, HappyHorse is built to help filmmakers visualize and test ideas earlier, spanning text-to-video, image-to-video, reference-to-video and editing workflows that carry a project from concept exploration through previsualization.

HappyHorse served as technology partner on three films from the 10,000 Parallel Universes program, all selected as winning works headed to Venice. Tamar AI and HappyHorse will co-host a program at the Venice Production Bridge built around that slate.

Glanze: The Future of Storytelling

The clearest sign of where TapNow wants all of this to go is Glanze, a streaming platform the company is preparing to launch out of the 10,000 Parallel Universes initiative and power with TapNow's production tools. Every title on Glanze starts as what the company calls a Glance, a first-look preview that can grow into full episodes, seasons and an expanding world audiences return to; viewers can press play immediately, reserve what comes next or dig into the places and artifacts behind a story.

"Wait, till AI blows your mind," says Sabrina Qin, brand lead at TapNow, referencing Guillermo del Toro's comments on AI at Cannes Film Festival.

Glanze is ultimately a bet that there are more Liu-and-Qiao-type stories out there, waiting on tools rather than budgets. "Primordia" carries forward a project the two have been building toward since their teenage years, now made with tools that didn't exist when they started drawing together.

Asked what advice they'd give the next creator trying to build a "parallel universe," Liu keeps it short: "Just do it. Take the first step."