Whispers: An Interactive Screening at Sydney Opera House

​Pickford and MiniMax present a special screening of Whispers, the 2026 Primetime Emmy Innovation finalist.

​This special event will be on the opening night of NeurIPS 2026 at the iconic Sydney Opera House in Australia.

​The evening includes drinks and canapés, a short panel on real-time worlds and audience-driven storytelling, and an interactive screening where guests steer the story from their phones as video is generated in real time using MiniMax’s video model.

​Q&A with the Pickford and MiniMax teams to close.

​Invitation only. Final agenda to follow.

​About Pickford

​Pickford is an applied AI lab for interactive storytelling. We treat a story as a policy: the room is its environment, the audience its reward. Our live shows run on real-time generative video and change as hundreds of people react at once, and every performance becomes training signal for the next one — stories that get better every time they're told. Along the way we've built the only beat-level dataset of collective audience emotion, and published on how to make a live generative story land a laugh (LaughLoop, NeurIPS 2026). Emmy finalist. Sundance, Cannes, Busan.

​About MiniMax
MiniMax is a global AI foundation model company founded in 2022 with a mission: Intelligence with Everyone. Our models span coding, agents, long-context understanding, and multimodal generation, serving 300M+ users and 1M+ enterprises and developers worldwide. MiniMax H3 brings stories to life — expressive motion graphics, precise lip sync, and sound woven into the scene. With Pickford, we’re exploring real-time generation that lets audiences shape a story as it unfolds.