Cristóbal Valenzuela is no stranger to strange and terrifying creatures. As co-founder and CEO of Runway, a five-year-old New York City startup that develops AI tools for video, his company’s products range from shape-shifting dolls that melt into walls to dancing giants with distorted faces.
When I talk to Valenzuela on winter afternoons, the topic of conversation is about why some scary creatures, even the scariest giants, aren’t so scary if you know how to destroy them.
“Sometimes a sling and a stone are all you need,” Valenzuela tells me.
We are talking about slings and stones because of the impressive shadow that stretches over the company of Valenzuela. A few days before our chat, OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed $86 billion generative AI behemoth, announced its latest creation. It’s a text-to-video conversion tool called Sora, which essentially does the same thing as Runway. In some cases, it might be better.
Like Runway’s products, Sora allows users to type a description of a scene into the computer (for example, a woman walking down a street full of puddles, or a fire-breathing dragon flying), and within seconds, You can watch the video. It was produced in Hollywood.
Sora’s high-profile announcement instantly sparked speculation about the tsunami of change heading into the entertainment industry. As if on cue, director Tyler Perry said he was postponing an $800 million expansion plan for his Atlanta production studio because of Sola. By late March, OpenAI executives were reportedly setting up meetings with studio executives and talent agencies to discuss how to use the tool.
“Sometimes all you need is a sling and a stone.”
Cristóbal Valenzuela, Runway Co-Founder and CEO
For technology companies, bringing the magic of AI to video is a huge opportunity that spans film, television, video games, advertising, and the burgeoning online creator industry, to name the most obvious candidates. Since its founding in 2018, Runway has expanded into many of these markets, building relationships with TV and film studios whose staffs use AI-powered editing tools, and helping artists like Kanye and his West Music has contributed to his videos and produced fascinating creatives with its texts. video app.
Now, almost overnight, the market that Runway was quietly forming on its own terms has turned into a battleground. Runway is hardly a minnow — it raised $141 million in funding last year from backers including Google and Nvidia, and boasts a $1.5 billion valuation — but the company’s It faces a direct challenge from rivals several times its size and commanded by the most influential companies in the AI industry. his OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, an entrepreneur and fundraiser;
“We’ve fought some Goliaths before,” Valenzuela says. Still, Mr. Valenzuela was the first to realize that this story was bigger than a matchup between his two deep-pocketed companies on opposite coasts. As AI continues to infiltrate industries, the expansion into video represents one of the technology’s most significant and high-stakes tests to date.
Anti-Silicon Valley startups
Headquartered in New York City, Runway built its business and culture thousands of miles away from the Silicon Valley scene (though it now has a San Francisco outpost in a beautiful Beaux Arts building). His three co-founders, Valenzuela, Anastasis Germanidis and Alejandro Matamara Ortiz, do not fit the typical tech mold. The trio of immigrants with backgrounds in film, computer science, design, and econometrics met at New York University’s interactive telecommunications program, and Cap He is more about the history of film than the tables and pitches he is on deck. I didn’t feel uncomfortable talking about it.
Mr. Valenzuela, who grew up in Chile, cites anti-poetry, a literary rebellion against traditional forms, to emphasize the company’s ethos of ignoring industry conventions. Runway’s goal is to empower a wide range of creators who have not previously had the opportunity to realize their cinematic visions by providing tools to “99% of the world,” but Valenzuela has not yet been able to reach him. That’s what it means.
Now in its second year, Runway’s AI Film Festival receives thousands of submissions from around the world and awards tens of thousands of dollars to short films that best illustrate the cinematic potential of AI. (Creatures that change shape stand out). . Runway earns her own accolade in 2022 Oscar-winning film Everything at once, wherever you are. His VFX artist on the film, Evan Halleck, said: variety Runway’s AI tools helped save a small team tons of time as they created a memorable scene where two moving rocks connect. Not only did the AI erase pulleys and other film gear from the green screen more accurately than he could, Halleck said, it was able to do it in minutes instead of half a day.
Recently, the company’s technology has become popular in music videos. The band Thirty Seconds to Mars released a trailer made entirely of content generated from Runway, and Madonna is using Runway in her World Tour visuals.
Runway’s product has four tiers ranging from free to $76 per month, as well as a version for enterprise customers, with each tier offering additional features. Runway, a privately held company, does not disclose its financial results, including whether it is profitable.But the company said luck The company’s annual recurring revenue will increase 24 times in 2023, and it expects that percentage to increase this year.
While Runway has previously differentiated itself from other AI video tools like Pika Labs and prototypes from Meta and Google, the company needs more success stories. Everything at once, wherever you are As competition intensifies.
A new sense of crisis
In a market as rapidly changing as generative AI, history and loyalty may not matter as much as what shiny new features your rivals introduce. OpenAI has shown that it can migrate at a frightening pace. The GPT large-scale language model for generating text has progressed from GPT-2 to GPT-4 in four years (the number of parameters used in the model is rumored to have increased by a factor of 1,000). Did. . His DALL-E, an OpenAI image generator, is his third version.
For now, OpenAI’s video debut, impressive as it may be, is just a demo. The company has not announced a date for the general availability of Sora.
But Valenzuela admits that OpenAI has brought a sense of urgency to Runway’s operations. “Now is the time to move faster and actually start doing more of the things we have always thought about and will continue to do,” he says.
With about 85 employees, Runway is significantly larger than OpenAI, which had more than 700 employees at the end of last year. (located in the project). OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, which includes a $13 billion investment from the software giant, is also a big plus. And, of course, there’s Altman, the former head of startup incubator Y Combinator. His stature is almost unparalleled within the money and power structure of Silicon Valley’s elite. After being briefly expelled from OpenAI in November as a result of a “breakdown of trust” with the board of directors, Altman is back at the helm and is more powerful than ever, with an artificial superpower that he predicts will be unleashed in the future. We are pursuing a quest to create intelligence. An unprecedented boom in productivity and wealth.
That’s a different vision from the one Mr. Valenzuela, an artist-turned-CEO, told technology site The Information last year: “Not everyone is trying to create God.”
The rocky road to Hollywood 2.0
Despite Runway’s lofty goals of democratizing filmmaking, AI has become a touchy subject in Hollywood. And one of the biggest wildcards in the new race to capture the video market is the headwinds it could cause.
Last year’s Hollywood walkout highlighted concerns that AI could eliminate jobs in the industry. While studios have vowed not to use AI to replace writers and actors, industry experts say the pace of AI advancement means the technology will become a major bottleneck in 2026, when the latest union contracts expire. thinking.
Copyright is also a minefield. Runway, Stability AI, and Midjourney were hit with a class action lawsuit in February from artists who claim the AI startup’s models were trained based on their work without permission. (Runway’s defense is that these artists can’t actually show examples of Runway creating exact replicas of their work.) And the surreal-looking misinformation Video AI’s potential to accelerate virality is already sounding alarm bells in the world’s capitals.
Some AI advocates liken the widespread industry disruption caused by AI-generated art to the displacement experienced by painters and pigment manufacturers with the advent of the camera. This phenomenon has led to Impressionism and other currently admired styles of modern art. Valenzuela points to orchestras that once provided live music for silent films, and as orchestras disappeared, new jobs arose, including sound engineers and special effects artists. “The key is to keep evolving,” he says. “We probably won’t need anything we’ve used or needed for the last 50 years to make great movies.”
Valenzuela calls this early golden age of filmmaking Hollywood 2.0. The shift to technocratic language is a clear indication of what’s to come for both Runway and Valenzuela. Her customary black T-shirt and matching black jeans ensemble has been worn by the likes of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and most recently Sam Altman.
If Runway’s efforts to conquer Hollywood with AI are successful, the New York startup could become an iconic technology company in its own right. But first, Valenzuela and his co-founders must contend with Silicon Valley’s AI Goliath.
The battle for Hollywood 2.0
Text-to-video generation AI tools have the potential to revolutionize the entertainment industry.
Runway
main office: new york
Established: 2018
CEO: cristobal valenzuela
employee: 85
product: Gen-2, AI Magic Tool
Major investors: Google, Nvidia, Salesforce, Felicis
Funding: $238 million
evaluation: 1.5 billion dollars
OpenAI
main office: San Francisco
Established: 2015
CEO: Sam Altman
employee: over 700
product: ChatGPT, DALL-E, Sora
Major investors: Microsoft, Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital
Funding: Over $13 billion
evaluation: $86 billion
This article is published in the April/May 2024 issue of the magazine. luck The headline was “Memo to Silicon Valley: Please join us.”
