TBC launches mischief 1, AI video at half a cent a second
The image-to-video model is built on Alibaba's Wan 2.2, and TBC says lessons from lab-grown neurons make it about five times faster.
Key takeaways
- TBC mischief 1 is an image-to-video model built on Alibaba's open-weight Wan 2.2, and TBC says it matches Wan 2.2's quality while generating video about five times faster.
- The model costs $0.005 per second of video at 480p and $0.01 per second at 720p, so a five-second clip runs 2.5 cents or 5 cents, per the pricing on fal and OpenRouter.
- TBC has published no independent benchmarks for the five-times-faster claim, a gap The Next Web noted in its coverage.
TBC mischief 1 is live. The Biological Computing Co. (TBC) launched TBC mischief 1 on October 30, 2026, an image-to-video model built on Alibaba's open-weight Wan 2.2 and sold through fal and OpenRouter. At $0.005 per second of video at 480p, a five-second clip costs 2.5 cents, and 100 clips cost $2.50.
mischief 1 turns a still image and a text prompt into a short clip. The fal endpoint offers 3- or 5-second durations at 480p or 720p, in landscape, rendered at 16 fps. Pricing is $0.005 per second at 480p and $0.01 per second at 720p, so a five-second clip runs 2.5 cents or 5 cents depending on the resolution tier. OpenRouter's listing carries the same figures, with supported sizes of 854x480 and 1280x720; fal's own schema gives the 480p tier as 832x480.
The neurons stay in the lab. TBC grows living neurons, measures how they respond to signals, and turns what it learns into a software layer that runs on standard GPUs and adds under 0.1% to the base model's parameter count, according to the launch release. TBC says that layer lets mischief 1 match Wan 2.2's quality while generating video about five times faster.
TBC has published no independent benchmarks for the speed claim, a point The Next Web raised in its coverage. A write-up on dev.to calls "neuron-derived" a provenance claim that is hard to audit from outside, and notes the release offers no technical report on how much of the speedup holds up next to standard techniques such as quantization and caching.
The launch lands five weeks after TBC announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services to bring the model to enterprise customers. TBC chief executive and co-founder Alex Ksendzovsky and co-founder and chief operating officer Jon Pomeraniec are both quoted in the release. Wonder Studios, an AI-native studio, tested mischief 1 in its own production workflow, and co-founder Justin Hackney is quoted on the model's speed and cost.
TBC mischief 1 is live on fal and OpenRouter now, starting at $0.005 per second of video at 480p.