Happy Birthday to Me (Self-Supervised)

A music video for deep learning's 14th birthday. On September 30, 2012, AlexNet was submitted to ImageNet and won with a 15.3% top-5 error; the runner-up had 26.2%. Lexi (Alex·Net → Lexi) is that kid at 14: bratty, brilliant, labeling everything. In 3 minutes and 14 seconds she recaps fourteen years of AI, from two GTX 580s to the Nobels, until the last line turns the detection box on you.

▶ Watch: premieres on YouTube on Sept 30, 2026.

Made on one RTX 3090 with a $0 budget, using open models, by Lino Valdovinos and Claude Opus 5.5 (in Claude Code).

How it's made

Every frame is a pure function of time, so any moment can be re-rendered and reviewed on its own. The full write-up is in video/PIPELINE.md; the shot plan is in video/STORYBOARD.md.

Make your own

You need: a 24 GB GPU (built on an RTX 3090, Windows 11), roughly 80 GB for model weights, Node, Python, FFmpeg, Chrome, ComfyUI, and Claude Code.

The easy way: clone the repo, open Claude Code in it, and say:

Read README.md and video/PIPELINE.md. Set up this pipeline on my machine, then help me make a music video for my song.

It sets up ComfyUI and the models, and walks through the steps below with you. That's how this video was made: one long conversation, with critic subagents reviewing every pass.

The steps:

1. Song and timing. Iterate on style and lyrics locally with ACE-Step 1.5 (music/, with legibility scored by faster-whisper). For the best final audio quality, generate the finished song with Suno; use a paid plan if you want to monetize it. Put your track in video/animation/assets/, then align the lyrics and beats (scripts/align_lyrics.py, into video/timing/); that data becomes src/song.js.
2. Look and character. Design a character sheet with Qwen-Image (video/workflows/qwen21_*) and cut out sticker poses (video/assets/split_sheet.py).
3. Plates. Write one prompt per lyric beat in video/plates/plates.py and generate them with run_plates.sh. Targeted fixes go through fix_plates.py.
4. Motion. Run run_ltx.sh per plate and extract_clips.sh, then trim the wonky parts in cuts.js.
5. Compose. Write shots in video/animation/src/riso/scenes/*.js. Review any moment with node render.mjs --sheet=12.5,31.8 --grid.
6. Render. Run FRESH=1 bash video/make_final.sh my-video to get the master, a 1080p share copy and a 720p copy.

Run GPU jobs one at a time (video/gpu_queue.sh). Overlapping heavy jobs crashed this machine once.

Model weights (download into ComfyUI's models/):

• Qwen-Image 2.1 int8 + Qwen3-VL 8B text encoder
• LTX-2.3 22B Q4_K_M GGUF, its distilled LoRA and x2 upscaler, plus a Gemma 3 12B text encoder
• Wan 2.1 I2V 14B fp8 + InfiniteTalk + lightx2v LoRA

Exact filenames are in video/workflows/*.json.

Credits

• Direction: Lino Valdovinos (@latent-variable).
• Co-creation (lyrics, storyboard, code, animation engine, edit): Claude Opus 5.5.
• Models and tools: Suno · ACE-Step · MiniMax Music 3 · YuE2 · Qwen-Image 2.1 · LTX-2.3 · InfiniteTalk · Wan 2.1 · ComfyUI · faster-whisper · librosa · p5.js · Puppeteer · FFmpeg.
• Animation kit and inspiration: John Heibel's ClaudeAnimationBase and I'm Upping My P(doom).
• Fonts (SIL OFL): Bricolage Grotesque · Instrument Serif · Silkscreen · Space Mono.
• Portraits: redrawn from Wikimedia Commons photos, credited in refs_attribution.json.

For Alex, Ilya & Geoff, and everyone who labeled ImageNet.

License

• Code and pipeline: MIT.
• Illustrations, stickers and portraits: CC BY-SA 4.0.
• The song is not included. It was made on Suno's free tier, so Suno owns it and allows personal, non-commercial use only. Bring your own track.
• Real people and company logos appear as a fan tribute; names and logos belong to their owners, and nothing here is an endorsement.