← On with Kara Swisher
On with Kara Swisher
Is AI Hollywood’s Newest Star? Runway AI’s Vision for the Future of Film
00:50:12
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- [00:01]
Kara Swisher
It's on. Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher. And I'm Kara Swisher. Really, it's me, the real Kara Swisher. You may think it's weird to stress that we're getting close to an AI generated future where you might not know if the influencer you follow or the host of your favorite podcast is a human or an AI generated bot. As First Lady Melania Trump said last week, the robots are here. Our future is no longer science fiction. I think that's a really bad version of Melania Trump, but I don't know what she was talking about. That said, that's what I want to talk about with my guest today, Cristobal Valenzuela, co founder and CEO of Runway AI, a media company that builds tools for creating AI generated images and videos. It and its competitors are already disrupting the advertising and film industry, and Runway is taking steps into gaming and, yes, Melania Robotics. I want to talk to Valenzuela about how their products work, how they're competing with much bigger tech players in this space and warding off their takeover advances. I also want to talk to him about what responsibility the AI video industry has in preventing deepfakes, including ones that could have devastating political consequences. By the way, we tried out some of Runway's tools and we're going to talk about that too. So if you want to see some weird AI videos of me, I think I look great. Check out our YouTube page on with Kara Swisher. Our expert question today comes from. From entertainment reporter Matt Bellany, founding partner of Puck News and the host of the Hollywood Insider podcast, the Town with Matt Bellany. This is the kind of lively conversation that's hard to fake, so stick around. Support for this show comes from smartsheet. Your team is innovative. Your team is ready to achieve the impossible. Innovative teams use Smartsheet to defy expectations, spur growth, and make the impossible possible. Smartsheet is the work management platform that allows teams to automate workflows and seamlessly adapt as their work evolves. Whether you're managing projects or scaling operations, smartsheet gives you the tools to cut through chaos and reach your team's full potential. With Smartsheet, the extraordinary is just another day at work. Work with flow. See how Smartsheet can transform the way you work at smartsheet.com that's smartsheet.com Adobe Acrobat Studio. So brand new. Show me all the things PDFs can do. Do your work with ease and speed. PDF Spaces is all you need. Do hours of research in an instant with key insights from an AI assistant. Pick a template with a click. Now your prezo looks super slick. Close that deal. Yeah, you won. Do that. Doing that, did that. Done. Now you can do that. Do that with Acrobat. Now you can do that. Do that with the all new Acrobat. It's time to do your best work with the all new Adobe Acrobat Studio.
- [03:02]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Support for this comes from Robinhood. Wouldn't it be great to manage your.
- [03:06]
Kara Swisher
Portfolio on one platform? With Robinhood, not only can you trade.
- [03:10]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Individual stocks and ETFs, you can also seamlessly buy and sell crypto at low costs. Trade all in one place.
- [03:18]
Kara Swisher
Get started now on Robinhood Trading. Crypto involves significant risk Crypto trading is.
- [03:23]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Offered through an account with Robinhood Crypto llc.
- [03:25]
Kara Swisher
Robinhood Crypto is licensed to engage in.
- [03:27]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Virtual currency business activity by the New.
- [03:29]
Kara Swisher
York State Department of Financial Services. Crypto held through Robinhood Crypto is not.
- [03:33]
Cristobal Valenzuela
FDIC insured or civic protected. Investing involves risk including loss of principal. Securities trading is offered through an account.
- [03:39]
Kara Swisher
With Robinhood Financial LLC MemberCIPIC, a registered broker dealer. It is on Chris, thanks for coming on on of course.
- [03:52]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Thank you for hosting me.
- [03:52]
Kara Swisher
Let's start with talking about the idea of generative AI video. It's a hot field right now and Runway is one of the top players in the industry. I want to ask you about two things you wrote in your blog, which a lot of philosophical musings about art and AI. You're actually more educated than most people I interview in tech. In March last year you posted the Medium is not the Goal. Art is not finished because AI can generate images. We haven't solved cinema because we invented a system that creates videos. Not all videos are cinema. Not all images are art. And then last month you wrote, this is a new medium. The only way we'll uncover what this medium can do is to stop judging it by what came before. Stop looking at the surface. Start experimenting with the core. We're not watching films evolve or watching something being born. So it feels like there's an evolution between those two posts. But let me have you tell me what you were meaning in both of those.
- [04:47]
Cristobal Valenzuela
I think it's part of what I'm trying to recognize and understand and make sure I can communicate is helping people understand the expectations around AI, specifically when it comes to art and media. And so the first pose, I think it's mostly about trying to make sure we distinguish the idea of AI being able to create sequences of moving images, with that being a replacement of art and videos and films and things we care deeply about, not because of how they were made, but because of what they transmit to us. And I think a common, I would say, approximation around AI when it comes to video is to think that because we can generate videos, because we can generate consistent, coherent sequences of things with AI, then, therefore, AI is like, it's the doom of Hollywood, and we're suddenly in a crisis mode.
- [05:33]
Kara Swisher
That would be the story, that's the narrative, right?
- [05:35]
Cristobal Valenzuela
And my point is, like, it's not. It's just a fancy way of making stuff. It's a camera, it's a medium, it's a tool. And in order for you to use it for storytelling, for art, for movie making, for whatever form of expression you want, you need to master the tool. And you need to master the tool in the same way that painters have mastered the canvas and filmmakers have mastered the camera. And for me, this tool is not working in the same way that we've used other tools. And so the second post kind of, like, touches on that, on the idea that in order for you to understand AI and what AI can do for you, you need to kind of move away from how you've created videos before. Because if you thought about the way you've created films or videos before, you're bounded to how cameras work, to how traditional CGI works. This new medium requires you to kind of leave behind those preconceptions and step into a brave new world. And I think part of those observations, I think, are coming just from experience. Seeing people make things with Runway, make things with AI and really understanding that through the history of technology, every time we've seen an increasingly radical change in technology, it has affected art in ways that artists at the time couldn't predict it.
- [06:53]
Kara Swisher
You said, stop looking at the surface. Start experimenting with the core. You're saying, stop bellyaching. It's not necessarily a job loser. Although it could be that people are immediately jumping to conclusions, presumably about it, which is very common. What's it gonna do to silent films? Well, you saw what happened there. What's it gonna do to radio when television came? What's the Internet gonna do to media? And a lot of damage in some cases, a lot of great things in others. So how are you thinking about it right now? Do you think that has shifted? Cause it certainly hasn't shifted in the common narrative in Hollywood, for sure. People are worried and they're.
- [07:28]
Cristobal Valenzuela
No, I think. I think it's shifted. It has changed a little bit, to be honest. I recognizing have the time to experiment more with the tools. I think two years ago, people were coming from, maybe from where you were mentioning this fear of what AI could represent. But eventually there's only one way of moving away from fear, which is just, well, let's try the thing, let's see why it works. And then eventually you try it and understand that there's a lot more into filmmaking than making moving images. And there's a lot more to art than just making pretty pictures. And I think the overall sentiment, at least from my experience within Hollywood, is that that vibe has changed for good reasons. And I think it will continue to change.
- [08:09]
Kara Swisher
What's the vibe now, would you say? And overall, what is the worst you're hearing and the best?
- [08:14]
Cristobal Valenzuela
I think the vibe has shifted towards, I think, acceptance and understanding of this as a creative medium, as a tool, as a powerful tool that comes with a lot of challenges, but one that if you know how to use well, it can take you very far.
- [08:28]
Kara Swisher
Mm. So Runway's being used in Hollywood and by big ad agencies on Madison Avenue. Obviously, it's not just spitting out TV series or a full ad with a couple of prompts. Explain how your tools are being used by professionals and give some examples. I know everyone likes to be secret about AI in film, but I'd really like some specifics.
- [08:47]
Cristobal Valenzuela
So there's a lot of that goes into making, let's say, a feature film, which. Which is actually very similar to how you make ads. Just like, the only difference might be the time, the budget, and the kind of, like, ambition of the project itself. But think about everything that goes before you actually shoot or make the final frames, which is pre production, storyboarding, scripting, previs. Those are all things that are needed for you to iterate on the story. The angle, the way you want to tell it, the art direction. Many parts of that process are now leveraging or using AI, including Runway. And so if you're a storyboarder or you're a screenwriter and you're working towards getting something done in the next couple of weeks, you can kind of like go from that idea to, like a storyboard in a few minutes by using Runway. And then after you've done with the pre production stages, going into more of the post production, the visual effects part of things is where you can leverage these tools to make you go through the process of editing way faster. And so instead of spending too much time on a particular scene, you're going to have an AI System that can aid you on generating parts of it. Will it make your film? Will it make your ad? No. Will it help you? Yes, a lot.
- [09:50]
Kara Swisher
So give me an example of something.
- [09:51]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Recently you can talk about on the film side. There are a couple films that have leveraged Runway in a particular set of scenes, mostly for either visual effects or, again, for pre production. So the thing is, for pre production, you don't see it. There's nothing you can actually, there's nothing tangible because it's part of the process of making something, and that helps you iterate on that process.
- [10:12]
Kara Swisher
So like a storyboard you were talking about, explain what that is for people who don't know.
- [10:16]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Sure. So think about animation, for example. Animation is very expensive to make, and so you want to make sure you can iterate as much as possible on the early stages of the animation pipeline. So when you're ready to render the frames and create the animations, you kind of know exactly what you need. The cameras, the angles, the characters, the positions of pretty much all of the objects and characters. And so what animators have kind of figured out is that the fastest and easiest way to iterate is on the storyboard. You basically create this kind of like quick drawings of exactly kind of what you want to tell the story and how the script kind of like translates to that board. And then you kind of create a small sequence of videos that actually you.
- [10:53]
Kara Swisher
To see how it looks.
- [10:54]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Right, exactly. It's kind of how it looks. And you sit there and you're like, ah, you know what? Now I'm looking at it. And like, the joke or the line really doesn't work that way. So we should come back and redo it again. Most of the time you're spending on making something like that is on that cycle.
- [11:09]
Kara Swisher
Right. So you're seeing the story before it is. So you don't make a mistake when you're going for the real thing.
- [11:14]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Correct. And the reason, because it's like, again, it's costly, it's very expensive. Of course it's very expensive. It's very hard. And so what AI is kind of doing is compressing a little bit of that iteration cycle. So instead of waiting another week to see the storyboard, you might have it in a day or so. That's great. Now you can iterate faster. You can relax, see the scene again, and be like, okay, let's change it again.
- [11:36]
Kara Swisher
Right. So clearly we're not Hollywood professionals. We tested Runway out, and I want to play our video. And then a video that your team sent over and chat about the two. And by the way, for our listeners, we have these videos on our YouTube page so you can go see them in all their glory. My team used three pictures of me, One in which I'm wearing a Revolutionary war costume. And don't ask why. It's a project I'm working on. One was taken after my son's graduation with him in a cap and gown, and the third, I'm playing with my kids in a ball pit. We prompted Ramway to combine them into one image, and then we took the image and turned it into a short video. Let's look at it. Generate a realistic image of Kara Swisher.
- [12:15]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Prompt.
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Kara Swisher
Combine revolutionary figure in ballbath with son wearing graduation cap and gown.
- [12:23]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Prompt.
- [12:23]
Kara Swisher
The boy wearing the graduation cap and gown pushes his mother, wearing the revolutionary war outfit for fun, into the ball bath, and the two of them pretend to fight.
- [12:35]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Prompt.
- [12:36]
Kara Swisher
The boy wearing the graduation cap and gown pushes his mother, wearing the Revolutionary War outfit for fun, into the ball pit, not bath. Runway. Did not know what I look like. Obviously, my son and I are falling back into the ball, but that looked kind of cool. I kind of look like a man, and he looks almost feminine. Explain what it did well there and what it struggled with and why.
- [12:59]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Yeah, so I guess it seems like, besides, we suck.
- [13:01]
Kara Swisher
But anyway, go ahead.
- [13:02]
Cristobal Valenzuela
No, look, I think this is a great example of what we were articulating before, which is it's a tool. And, like, using a tool requires you to understand how it works and what it does and it can do. And if you're new to it, you're probably gonna not be good for the first time. It's gonna take time for you to understand how it works. And I think part of what we're trying to showcase, and hopefully we can see the video that we made, is if you spend the right amount of time with the tools themselves, you can make great content. If you just come and type your name and it doesn't make the thing that you want, it's probably because you need a bit more time understanding how to get to where you need to go.
- [13:37]
Kara Swisher
So what went wrong there? What did we not do? Why does he look like a lady and I look like a man suddenly?
- [13:43]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Well, I think I'll have to look at the inputs more, particularly, more specifically. But in the first example, for example, just with your name, the model might not know exactly what you're talking about. Like, who is this person? Who is Kara?
- [13:54]
Kara Swisher
You need more pictures.
- [13:55]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Yes, I need more references. Right. And I need to be Specific about exactly what I want. I think a common misconception with AI video is that it's going to work in the same way that chatbots work. Right. So I think it's a realization these days that most people's experience with AI is via like, I don't know, chatgpt or clock.
- [14:12]
Kara Swisher
So it'll know. Mount Everest, it'll know, Right?
- [14:14]
Cristobal Valenzuela
So it's a factual thing. You ask a question and like you get an answer back. But the thing is, in art, in video, there's no concrete answer. When you tell me I want to see a picture or I want to see a scene of me jumping through a building, what you have in your head, it's very different from what I imagine in my head. And so we're never going to reach consensus unless you show me the most amount of references and details exactly what you want. And so that's a good reflection overall of the video itself that it's not a bad start. It's definitely a good start, but it requires you to now understand that you might need to go deeper. Maybe a close up of your face might be better than a medium shot because there's a lot of things in the image that are gonna get lost. Maybe you want something that might require you to split the images into four parts first and then combine them together.
- [15:01]
Kara Swisher
So it's a little more complex than say, a chatbot, but people are used to the chatbot having the relatively correct answer. It's getting more correct than ever, I guess. All right, your team, the video your team sent over is obviously more professional. And I'm a Top Gun pilot. Thank you very much. Let's watch. I want you to about how this was made. So a couple of things. A lot of challenges getting the movement right. The face is different in every scene, which is interesting. My glasses, you completely wrong, but that's me looking at it. Talk about the making of this and how long it took and the biggest challenges. It's also highly entertaining and well done. It's not that it's pretty good. It's actually very good. So talk a little bit about that.
- [15:49]
Cristobal Valenzuela
It took around two hours of one person's time to make that video. The biggest, I would say, challenge was the comments you're giving us, which is like, oh, the glasses on the right are not exactly the same and my face looks slightly different from this shot to this shot. It basically is the consistency and the controllability aspects of it are. It takes time for you to understand how to manage and iterate through it to get exactly where you need to go. But the fact that you can make a video like that in two hours for me is.
- [16:19]
Kara Swisher
So you have templates of My sea captain is not very attractive, but you have templates of an astronaut. I assume that then you lay a real person.
- [16:29]
Cristobal Valenzuela
It's all generated.
- [16:30]
Kara Swisher
No, it's all generated. Okay.
- [16:31]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Yeah, it's all generated from scratch. Those videos don't exist. None of those sequences have ever been created before. We're just customizing, creating them for you. And so you can think about it as. It's an infinite amount of things, combinations and videos that you can make. And with the right inputs and with the right experience, you can make again, things like that in two hours or so. And of course, if we spend way more time, we can make it even better. But I think to your point, it's actually really fun making stuff like this. It's just so entertaining. It's fun to be able to take an idea that you have in your head and do it for the sake of, like, you know, entertaining yourself.
- [17:08]
Kara Swisher
What do the challenges mean for Hollywood then? Obviously, it took someone who knew how to do it two hours and it's still not perfect. But what did the challenges mean for Hollywood then?
- [17:17]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Training people to use this, you know, again, setting the expectations in the right way. I always mention this to people that think about this as a new camera. Right. And if I. If you. What was the last film you watched?
- [17:29]
Kara Swisher
Oh, Superman.
- [17:31]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Superman. So if they gave you the camera that they used to record Superman, would you expect to make something like Superman?
- [17:37]
Kara Swisher
No, no, of course not.
- [17:38]
Cristobal Valenzuela
This is kind of similar. If I'm giving you the tools and I'm showing you a video, would you make the same video Just because they give you the tool in like a minute, you're probably like, no, you need to spend more time. You need to understand it.
- [17:48]
Kara Swisher
What about people who are experienced in cgi? I mean, like, a lot of people can't. Original computer programmers didn't necessarily shift to the Internet as quickly, but some did, right. Or new people came along and had a different 100.
- [18:02]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Yeah, that's kind of the point for a lot of, like, CGI and visual effects artists. This is amazing. Like, you're going to be able to do things that used to be very hard and expensive. And the software that people use, that it's like 20 years old. And so I always joke with people in the VFX and CGI community that this is a way for them to get a weekend off. Because if you're working a production cycle. You're probably getting a lot of notes on the weekend and you're iterating and cranking through every aspect of everything you got. And imagine a system that allows you to do those iterations faster. Like, great, you can go on a weekend now you're gonna have time off.
- [18:36]
Kara Swisher
I think they're worried about total time off, but go ahead.
- [18:39]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Well, that's my point. I think there's parts of it that will definitely task that will go away. Like there are things that you just might not need people full time dedicated for that. But to your point, I think it also opens the door for many other people to discover an entire new task and entire new jobs. I think it's a consistent pattern in technology and art and filmmaking that that technology allows you to do just a bunch of new things you never thought of doing before.
- [19:03]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, that's the technologist argument. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from smartsheet. Did you know there is one human experience more universal than death and taxes? What do you think it is? Take a guess. Okay, I'll tell you. It's creativity. I know you're probably thinking, yeah, right, I'm not that creative. Or maybe you're thinking, I am creative, but I have just so much trouble tapping into my creativity. And in that, my friend, you are not alone. Perhaps because there is actually one thing more universally human than death and taxes and creativity. It is distraction. That's where smartsheet comes in. Smartsheet is the work management platform that helps clear clutter, break down barriers and streamline workflows to allow your creativity to, you know, flow. Its innovative platform lets your team find its rhythm no matter the obstacles. When roadblocks emerge, smartsheet empowers teams to chart a new course. One where innovation thrives. We all have the power to tap into creative flow. We just need some help clearing away distractions. And smartsheet knows exactly how to do that. Work with flow. Learn more@smartsheet.com Support for On with Kara Swisher comes from LinkedIn. As a small business owner, you don't have the luxury of clocking out early. Your business is on your mind 24 7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new feature allows you to write job description and quickly get your job in front of the right people. With deep candidate insights, you can either post your job for free or pay to promote in order to receive three times more qualified applicants. Let's face it, at the end of the day, the most important thing for your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn you can feel confident that you're getting the best. That's why LinkedIn claims that 72% of small business owners who use LinkedIn find high quality candidates. So find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com Kara that's LinkedIn.com Kara to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Adobe Acrobat Studio so brand new. Show me all the things PDFs can do. Do your work with ease and speed. PDF Spaces is all you need. Do hours of research in an instant with key insights from an AI assist. Pick a template with a click. Now your prezo looks super slick. Close that deal. Yeah, you won. Do that. Doing that, did that. Done. Now you can do that. Do that with Acrobat. Now you can do that. Do that with the all new Acrobat. It's time to do your best work with the all new Adobe Acrobat Studio. In every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Let's listen to yours.
- [22:13]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Hi, it's Matt Bellany, host of the Town podcast and founding partner at Puck. I have a question for Crystal Ball. Runway has announced a couple of deals with Lionsgate and with AMC Networks to integrate Runway models into their workflows internally. But there haven't been a lot of other announcements with big studios in Hollywood. And I'm curious why Lionsgate and AMC are two of the more struggling studio outlets. At this point, Lionsgate's looking for a sale. AMC has had its value dropped significantly. It seems like they're a little bit more willing to do these deals because they are struggling. Is that the case? Will we see others jump on board with these types of deals to let Runway into their internal workflows? Or do the others just have a little bit more power and are kind of resisting at this point? Thanks a lot.
- [23:09]
Kara Swisher
Now, just before you answer, I know that Netflix had been using your tools. Disney is said to have been looking at the technology. But answer Matt's question. What's the difference between Hollywood using your products versus integrating to the workflows themselves?
- [23:22]
Cristobal Valenzuela
I think that for me the question was More about who's announcing it publicly and who's actually using it. I think it's fair to assume that you should expect a lot of, if not most of studios and people experimenting with AI in Hollywood. I think people are getting more comfortable also with announcing and speaking more publicly about it. But the Lionsgate partnership for us was years in the making, and we announced it recently, but it's been happening for quite some time. And so we've never done relationships with studios or with other partners for the sake of announcing it. It's more of like, they feel comfortable with announcing than like, we should. But there's a lot of work behind the scenes with other studios as well.
- [24:01]
Kara Swisher
What about integrating into their workflows?
- [24:04]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Well, that's the goal. Like, we want to integrate. We want to make sure if you're making something, we can help you and aid you at getting that stuff done faster, cheaper, better. Everyone works differently. Everyone does things differently. And so there's no one size fits all. To be honest. I think we want to work with a lot of them. We actually have a specific studio team inside the company. So Runway is a research technology company that has. You think about it as, like, small.
- [24:29]
Kara Swisher
You're embedded.
- [24:30]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Exactly. A small studio. And the goal for that studio has two kind of, like, main goals. One is we're making original content ourselves, and so we kind of use the tools and make animations and make short films, and that helps inform the research on the product itself. And then we also go into studios and kind of have that people work alongside the other our clients or customers. And that's, again, we're creating this new kind of camera. And so we need to show you.
- [24:55]
Kara Swisher
How the camera works and when they're using them. You say all the studios are trying these things out or trying these tools out or looking at them. Possibly they don't want to talk about them because of the fears around from the unions and jobs and things like that would be my assumption.
- [25:08]
Cristobal Valenzuela
I think partially. It's also like competition. Like, if you figure out how something works and it's giving you an edge in a very competitive landscape, like the media market is, you know, you want to make sure you can just keep that for you. And I think there's a lot of internal, unique pipelines and workflows. People have been working with AI that are, I think, are very unique, and it's fair for them to try to keep them as private as possible for as long as they can.
- [25:30]
Kara Swisher
Runway has been called the number one all in one powerhouse for AI video generation. But you have huge competition. There's Google, Veo Meta's moviegen Midjourney and of course Sora from OpenAI, which just announced is working on a feature length animated film called Critters with a Z Runway. Sponsored. An AI short film festival that ran in IMAX theaters this summer. But OpenAI will debut at Cannes. Talk a little bit about this. This film is supposed to have a much shorter timeline. Nine months instead of three years, and a much smaller budget than your typical animated feature.
- [26:07]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Yeah, so I've been working on this for seven, almost eight years. And I think we've created an industry and the idea that you can use AI for film and art. And my realization is from a market perspective, if the market is interesting enough, you're going to attract some of the biggest competitors to try to build the stuff that you're trying to build. And I think that's a great validation for us. It's like we were a small team trying to do this very hard thing and now all of these people are now trying to build similar things. I think it makes us realize that there's something special here. And it also makes us realize that we need to continue being very independent in how we think about the roadmap of the product. I'll give you an example. We've hosted our film festival for almost three years now before anyone else thought about AI and film. We celebrated our third version of a film festival a couple months ago. We sold out the Lincoln center in New York City. We had thousands of people come and watch the films. We partner with industry standards, including the Tribeca Film Festival and the Gothams in New York. And I think part of it is we've always thought about making sure that we can work with industry really closely. And we realize that also will attract others to try to do it.
- [27:21]
Kara Swisher
To try to do it. The worry of course is you're either Netscape or Google, right? You're either the one that pioneered it and won or pioneered it and got run over, essentially.
- [27:30]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Well, I think you have to same.
- [27:32]
Kara Swisher
Thing with OpenAI possibly, by the way.
- [27:35]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Look, I think the market is competitive. There's no question around it. I think AI itself is very competitive and it's very intense. But I think we're very confident in like, well, if we pioneer it, we need to make sure we can keep on doing it. And it doesn't mean that we've reached like now it's the final form. There's so much research and so much interesting ideas of products that you can continue building. And I Think what I've realized over time is you have to deeply care about what you're trying to solve and work for. I work on this not because I thought it was a good business. It's my obsession. It's what I deeply care about. It's my combination of interests from software to art to research. And I think our team deeply cares about that more than anything else. I think that overall eventually becomes a much more powerful way of winning the market than just throwing money at a problem.
- [28:20]
Kara Swisher
Well, Meta was trying to beat Substack and it just didn't, for example. But let's be clear. What usually happens is that one product becomes the industry standard, the Kleenex, so to speak. And on your blog you recently wrote, a big mistake is to think AI will play out similarly to how the Internet story developed. But the truth is the Internet need thousands of companies to build infrastructure. AI needs perhaps a dozen. Talk a little bit about this.
- [28:44]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Yeah. So I think I'm realizing that a lot of the value in AI goes to the extremes. So the chip manufacturers, the silicon and the other side, the research lab, the model builders and the tool builders. I think what's different in AI with previous tech transformation was that the picture shovels everything in between there. I think it's eventually going to get captured, developed by those building the models themselves. And this is coming from experience where, I guess what I'm trying to say is we get a lot of, I don't know, products and services and companies that want to offer us things to build our models, but we've developed most of those things, kind of like in house. There's no need for us to outsource that because it's critical to our business, it's critical to the research that we do. And so it's more of a, I would say like the Apple Playbook, where you have to build the entirety of the stack, or like SpaceX, you have to build almost two to the nuts and the bolts. The value there is that allows you to have a lot of control. If I need to change something on my model or in my training infrastructure, I can just do it. It's difficult. It's way difficult because you have to build pretty much every part of it.
- [29:50]
Kara Swisher
But obviously you have competitors with a lot of deep pockets. Google has a market cap of 2.8 trillion. Meta's is 1.9 trillion, give or take. OpenAI's latest valuation was around 500 billion. And after your last funding round, it's nothing to sneeze at. Runway was valued at 3 billion. But that is kind of small. Again, I don't want to play that down, but you're a comparably small company and the CEOs of those companies all had dinner with President Trump. But that White House last week, I noticed you weren't there. But don't worry about it. I feel better about you because of that. Because they were toadies upon toadies. How do you or other smaller AI companies compete with those deep pocketed tech giants who are trying to get any angle they can in this sector?
- [30:29]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Just relentless execution, the best product experience. It's David versus Goliath. These companies need to be challenged. We can't believe in a world where there's one or two companies deciding every single product and experience we have. I think companies like Runway are trying to question that to the core. And I think part of it is we need to recognize if we succeed, we're going to attract them to try to even compete more with us. I think it's fine. We've done this for quite some time. We've had a lot of competition come and go, but we're still here.
- [31:01]
Kara Swisher
So what is the slingshot then? What is the weakness they have from your perspective? And what's the strength that you want worry about?
- [31:07]
Cristobal Valenzuela
I think. Look, I'll tell you a story I've heard recently from one of our clients and customers. He's head of a studio. He has made movies that you probably have watched multiple times and many folks in the audience might have watched multiple times. He told me that the reason that they can go with any of the large companies is that they fundamentally don't understand what they're trying to do. And so there's a little bit of that argument that it comes across just like the wrong way when you, you show some filmmakers an AI tool and expect them to use it. And it feels a little bit, I would say, rub them the wrong way. We're different. We come more from, I would say, a similar background to them, to the type of problems they want to solve. And we sit with them understanding the challenges of making something like a feature film or a commercial or an ad or a short film. And the tools that we build are with that in mind. And so from a user perspective, I would say there's something around knowing who you're solving for and understanding their pain that I think hits different for the people working in the arts and in media. And I think that for us has been a huge advantage over time. I mean, they wanted to work with us and not with everyone else, right?
- [32:19]
Kara Swisher
What's the thing you worry about is just the money and their aggression or what's is there?
- [32:24]
Cristobal Valenzuela
What do you mean? From them. From competition.
- [32:25]
Kara Swisher
From them, yeah, from the bigger competition. I get it. Netflix ran circles around all of Hollywood, right?
- [32:31]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Correct.
- [32:32]
Kara Swisher
There's example after example. There's also example after example of getting run over, Right?
- [32:37]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Sure, yeah. I mean, you have to just keep that in mind. I do feel like if you just look practically at what has happened over the last couple of years, all you're saying is true. All of these companies have a thousand times the budget, we have a thousand times the researchers and the engineers that we have. Yet we're still winning on the best at what we do. So there's an argument to be said that that shouldn't be the case because all these companies who have just invested way more and they have, they have invested way more, yet they still can do it. And I think part of it again is it takes a different set of cultural and intuitions and priorities to try to lead the way and be the one helping versus trying to catch up. And I think a lot of these large companies are playing more of a catch up game, which I think it's something we're thinking about. Of course there's still competition, but I think catching up is just different. If you're trying to make sure you're in the edge and you're helping customers understand what's next versus just selling whatever the market has already established is the thing.
- [33:35]
Kara Swisher
So OpenAI Meta and Google are offering these huge salaries, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, to recruit AI researchers and engineers. Is that a difficult thing to deal with? These salaries? Because that's something that's affecting the whole market, I think.
- [33:48]
Cristobal Valenzuela
I don't know. I don't know how much of that narrative is actually true, to be honest. I think it's definitely a good story and a good headline, but I don't think it's that true among the larger research industry. And I've compared notes with other companies and our researchers and it's not that everyone is getting that. So I don't think it has affected most companies, to be honest.
- [34:11]
Kara Swisher
In a way, it's just a big story. That's a very good point. Speaking of which, there was reporting earlier this year that Meta was looking at Runway as an acquisition target. Fort bought a huge share in scale AI and Acqua hired Alexander Wang. You said you're hitting an inflection point. It's getting too exciting for you not to be independent. As someone who has stayed independent Myself, I get the attraction and everyone was going to kill me. And I'm still standing and they are not killing me. I imagine it's still very hard to stay independent when the checks keep getting bigger and bigger.
- [34:40]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Depends on what you're trying to obsess around and work around. Again, I don't see myself doing anything else and building Runway. And so the team, I feel, is very similar lead to that. I think for us thinking about selling the company around, it will be a mistake. We're getting to a point, as I was saying before, it's an inflection point. The models are getting good, adoption is growing. It's the most fun. It's probably similar to when you went independent. Now is the most exciting time to work on this. I think that's my North Star right now. Just making sure we keep doing that.
- [35:13]
Kara Swisher
Meaning that you're doing well. So why should you sell? I just was actually talking to someone about a sale of a media company. I said, you don't sell if you're doing who sell because of another reason. Do you feel like you have enough control over the company to be able to resist that?
- [35:27]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Yeah.
- [35:28]
Kara Swisher
You feel like you have that if there's some crazy number came in from somebody. One of the dark flip side, as we talked about to the huge salaries for AI engineers, a lot of workers, as I said, in the film and advertising industry could lose their jobs. Everything from actors to animators. And I know tech people always say there will be new jobs. How do you calm those concerns? What is your patter about that when you're trying to make deals with the film industry, including unions, this has become a rallying cry for them. So what is your best argument for them when this is the concern? And especially because no one quite knows, as you said, what it's going to be yet.
- [36:06]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Well, first of all, engage with them. I've met with the unions themselves, with the guilds, and I think part of it is again helping understand what this technology actually does and how you can benefit from it.
- [36:18]
Kara Swisher
It.
- [36:18]
Cristobal Valenzuela
I think my overall summary has been focus on people rather than jobs. Like jobs change, technology will change jobs all the time. Look at the history of film is the history of technology. It has changed many times before through many of the decades we've seen. And it wasn't really about the jobs as much as the people doing the jobs. So if you're hiring people, if you're a guild member, if you're in a union, well, help your people understand how to use these tools, train them, get them on board with the latest, understand how they can upskill what they already know. I think it changes a little bit the perspective, and I think that's been my position so far. I think it allows us to work alongside them in much more productive ways.
- [37:01]
Kara Swisher
We'll be back in a minute.
- [37:14]
Cristobal Valenzuela
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- [37:41]
Kara Swisher
It To Me, we're talking about all things wellness. We spend nearly $2 trillion on things.
- [37:46]
Cristobal Valenzuela
That are supposed to make us well.
- [37:48]
Kara Swisher
Collagen, smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes and fitness trackers. But what does it actually mean to be well? Why do we want that so badly? And is all this money really making us healthier and happier? That's this month on Explain It To Me. Presented by Pure Leaf this episode is brought to you by Swiped A Hulu original from 20th Century Studios. Meet the woman who made the first move. Starring Lily James as Whitney Wolf, the visionary founder of Bumble. Through extraordinary grit and ingenuity, Whitney breaks into the male dominated tech industry and launches an innovative, globally lauded date dating app. Forever changing dating culture. A Hulu original swiped streaming September 19th on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers. Terms apply. One of the things I think many people and at least are worried about is the more realistic Gen AI video gets, the bigger concern for privacy and for security. Con artists are using deep fake videos of celebrities and pro athletes, but also everyday professionals like doctors to scam people out of money. It's a huge issue also for lawmakers because it's gotten their attention. There were deep fakes of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Amy Klobuchar circulating earlier this summer. President Trump, of course, has reposted doctored videos, including one that portends to show President Obama being arrested in the White House. Talk about this issue because one of my big things is many of the big tech companies have no interest in safety whatsoever. But what are you doing or willing to as a company prevent your tools from being used for scams or even political manipulation? It may not be your full responsibility, but it certainly is partially a responsibility.
- [39:35]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Yeah, well, I can't really speak about other companies and their approaches, but I can tell you about ours. We take it very seriously. And I think that's why most of these studios want to work with us and are approaching us and have adopted Runway. We have a trust and safety team. We have a terms of service. There's stuff that we want to allow you to generate. I think there's a particularly consistent approach towards moderation and safety. And again, part of it is us doing things, but also learning from who we're working with, with. I think we've erred sometimes on the side of being too safe where we moderated people from users, their own likeness at Runway. And so if you come and you try to generate with your picture, we might block you and you're like, but it's me, I can do it. And so it's a hard problem because you want to make sure people understand the right way of using it. And I agree with your point. It's not that Runway will solve and we'll have all the answers to a question like that. I think a lot of it has to do with just. Just the social and cultural implications of how you help people understand what the technology can do and come to a world where it's going to be perhaps different from what you've seen media before. I do feel that a lot of the questions around likeness are still somehow the same that we've dealt with it before. Without AI, you can still get in trouble. Non AI, by recreating someone's likeness that doesn't change. You still should be responsible how we use the technology itself and it's in the user's like, best interest to make sure they're using it the right way.
- [41:04]
Kara Swisher
Would you support Congress codifying guardrails that were specifically related to AI?
- [41:10]
Cristobal Valenzuela
I think there needs to be norms and changes on regulation to adapt to AI. That's a reality. It's like laws change to adapt to the Internet. I'm not sure how and when, to be honest, because it feels very early still. And you need to make sure you understand both. Both innovation as a incentive for companies to keep making progress and the challenges that will come around. I think that we will and we need. I'm not sure just exactly when and how.
- [41:40]
Kara Swisher
I'm speaking of which. The EU's AI act now mandates that AI generated content be clearly labeled and have watermarks. Right now, consumers in the US pay a premium to get non watermarked videos from Runway and other AI companies. It's part of your business model. Would you support regulations Mandating watermarks or labels that would ensure that it's identifiable in some way. It doesn't necessarily have to be a watermark. There might be another system.
- [42:02]
Cristobal Valenzuela
There are different systems. We've experimented with a few. I think it's also a hard problem because there's ways of removing the watermarks. And so I think part of it is there's a technical challenge around how do you make sure you can keep watermarking and identifying things. And at the same time, I think there's more of a cultural and social watermarking of sorts. And I think we've done this before with Photoshop. People were freaking out with the idea that you can modify images back in the night. And I think eventually Photoshop became a burb. It was like, oh, you can just Photoshop things. I think we need somehow something similar here where you're becoming a bit more skeptical about what you see because you've seen how things can be modified. And that's just a social kind of like up there.
- [42:42]
Kara Swisher
Sure, but is there a technological. I mean, everyone can get around everything. I'm not naive, but should there be some sort of new provenance system for these materials?
- [42:51]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Yeah, there's an argument, you know, I heard the other day, an interesting argument where, like, we should do the other. The other way around, which is you should validate and watermark the real content. And I think maybe that already is happening in some way where if the amount of content given AI will expand exponentially and you have just way more things, then we should kind of reverse maybe the question and be like, well, what actually is editorial and it's real, and then protect or make sure that those are verified. And look, in a way, I think that happens already. You have like community notes in social media. You have companies or brands or institutions that you know, you're going to trust when it comes to, like, knowing if something is real or not. And so in a way, I think the system is already heading towards that space.
- [43:34]
Kara Swisher
Although you could say that that was when YouTube was telling all the companies, well, find it and we'll take it down. But that was all the work came from them versus YouTube, which was benefiting.
- [43:43]
Cristobal Valenzuela
You can also automate that with AI. It's kind of. You can use AI to help on that curation. They sort of process as well.
- [43:49]
Kara Swisher
Eventually they figured out and they're doing rather well with it. So, last question, this area. Last week, President Trump was asked about a video of what appeared to be a black garbage bag being thrown out the window at the white House. It really was one, it was real. But Trump said it was probably AI generated. Then he told reporters, quote, if something happens, it's really bad. Maybe I'll just blame AI. Thoughts on AI video being used as a get out of jail free card from a particularly specious politician in a way to undermine public trust in reality. Are you worried about that?
- [44:15]
Cristobal Valenzuela
That's an interesting question. I think what happens actually with those kind of questions is that we socially get and culturally get much more attuned to identifying what's real and what's not. And probably him saying that made a bunch of people go and debunk the video. And so it almost feels like if there's video evidence, it's easier to debunk something versus if it's not. There's a lot of of fake stories out there that are just words, you know, they're just like, oh, I saw something, someone told me about it. But it's hard to debunk because you can't see it. I don't think it's going to go that far, to be honest, to rely on videos because it's very easy to see if it's real or not. I think that happened with that video. People were like, yeah, it's real. So in a way I think it casually creates.
- [45:00]
Kara Swisher
He wants to cause chaos everywhere he.
- [45:02]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Goes, but it doesn't last too long. And my feeling is that it's not going to be there for a long time, to be honest.
- [45:09]
Kara Swisher
Before we go, I want to talk briefly about the areas you're looking in the future. You've taken some first steps into gaming, which includes nonlinear storytelling and robotics. I didn't even understand. I kept trying to figure out what the hell you're doing there. Talk about the potential for gen AI video in these areas and what challenges do you need to overcome?
- [45:26]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Yeah, we've entered into a couple of new avenues for our research and products, as you were saying, nonlinear stories. And so you can think of about all the work we've done until this point publicly has been around films and ads and videos. And that for me is linear media. You watch something and it looks the same every time you watch it. If you think about games, those are non linear, right? You can move around the world in open ways. There's a lot of use case around AI specifically when it comes to real time video AI that allows you to create game like experiences. And so we are now releasing a couple of products on that front. And now if you think about how you use these models to create those kind of experiences is the outputs are just pixels, they're just moving images, which is not that different from how you train robots to understand the world. And so let's say you're training a robot to understand how to pick a box. What you do is you show the model or the AI a bunch of different videos of people picking that box. So the model understands. Here's how I use my robotic arm to pick that box. Now that's a very expensive thing because you have to create that actual picking of the box box. You can think about that extrapolated to a thousand examples and it gets really expensive really fast. And so there's use cases of hard technology where you take the same insights of how you generate video for film, but you use it to train robots and the robot can learn from that synthetic or generated set of videos. It's something kind of new and in oldie was possible because the models are getting good at it.
- [46:49]
Kara Swisher
Actually that's how I was there when imagenet started and that's how they did that. This is the Eiffel Tower. This is a man, this is a woman. And then it iterated from there. Which is the original one?
- [47:00]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Yeah, it's close to that.
- [47:02]
Kara Swisher
What are the challenges you need to overcome and what is the biggest challenge in this area? With robotics, for example?
- [47:08]
Cristobal Valenzuela
For robotics, I mean, it's just getting good, high quality data that fits the specific needs of different robotics, like teams. There are companies solving different things. So driving cars on the one end, I don't know, there's robotic arms on other ones, there's physical interactions in homes. I think robotics is a field that's moving very fast and part of the things that it needs to keep on moving is data. It's just very hard to gather that data to train the models. And so sure, yeah, good data.
- [47:31]
Kara Swisher
And gaming is a huge industry. That's an obvious one to do. And in that way, what's the challenge there?
- [47:36]
Cristobal Valenzuela
I think the challenge is there's both. There's a real time component to it. It's like how do you make sure these games are rendered fast at the expectations that users are expecting for a game? Like, and also I think the mechanics. So what I mean by this is if you think about a game, you're playing something that someone already created. And so the rules are very defined, the characters are defined. In this idea of AI video, you can create worlds that no one has ever defined. And so the mechanics are open. And so the challenges that are about, well, how do you make sure people have a story to follow and what are the rules of that world? You might not be designing every single interaction. You might be designing the way you want things to behave overall, and then have the system kind of like, play it out. And so there's a lot of mechanics around the experience that I still need to figure out.
- [48:22]
Kara Swisher
So, last question. You co founded Runway in 2018, which seems like a million years ago. It's hard to state how much has changed in this field since then. And if you look down the road 2, 3, 5 years, what does Runway look like? Are you providing AI service to films and studios and agencies, or have you expanded to become an original creative studio yourself? That's certainly possible. What would you imagine the next step in the evolution that will allow it to come? One of the companies, the dozen AI companies that survives in the long run?
- [48:52]
Cristobal Valenzuela
You know, we've always thought about Runway as a company focus on storytelling more than anything else. And our goal is to make sure that there's many stories out there that we haven't heard from before, because people haven't had the means to tell those stories. And we want to be the company who's creating that new kind of camera, that new device that allows you to tell those stories. And those stories can be for, like, AAA filmmakers making Hollywood movies, but also could be for you in your home and for your friends. And there's many. There are so many opportunities around storytelling that I think we haven't kind of like tapping before because technology hasn't allowed us to get there. I think five years, 10 years in from now, I think we want to be at the forefront of that new wave of storytelling.
- [49:34]
Kara Swisher
But does that mean you become an original? I mean, you're calling yourself a camera a lot, but are you the director or the writer or the what?
- [49:41]
Cristobal Valenzuela
We're experimenting with making things in our own, like, studio. But I think the broader opportunity is to make sure that the billions of people out there can make things. I think from a personal note, I always wanted to. Wanted to be a filmmaker. I grew up in Chile. I never had the. The means to, like, work around film. And I think there's many people like me back then that if they had just the right resource from a technological standpoint, maybe there's the great storytellers. They're great filmmakers. I think I want to empower them more than anything else. That's what drive us.
- [50:08]
Kara Swisher
What would your movie be?
- [50:09]
Cristobal Valenzuela
I don't know. I have. Look, I'm making, like I was on the weekend just now making a bunch of, like, short films. With Runway and, like, short ideas. And they're not like blockbuster movies or. I don't want to, like, become a filmmaker and devote myself to it, but it's great to, like. I had this idea, experimented through it. I make it, and I made like four or five minutes of that scene, and I feel great. It's amazing. It's like painting. It's like writing. There are many people out there who are obsessed with AI because of that. It's an avenue. It's a way of cultivating your creative mind that, for me, is extremely valuable more than anything else.
- [50:41]
Kara Swisher
Oh, my God. Now everyone does want to become a director and will, you know, that old thing.
- [50:45]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Why not? I mean, if they can, they should.
- [50:48]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, Some people shouldn't become a director, but we'll see. We'll see. I really appreciate it. What an interesting company you have. I really like to talk to smaller companies. I'm so tired of the large companies. I do hope they don't run right over you. I do. Because I think it's.
- [51:03]
Cristobal Valenzuela
We'll continue.
- [51:04]
Kara Swisher
I don't necessarily think they will because I think they're the least creative people on the planet. So in many ways, that's. That's in your favor. Anyway, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
- [51:15]
Cristobal Valenzuela
Thank you. It's been great. Great chat.
- [51:22]
Kara Swisher
Today's show was produced by Christian Castor Russell, Kateri Yocum, Michelle Eloy, Megan Burney and Kaylin Lynch. Special thanks to Katherine Barner and Eamon Whalen. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Tracking academics. If you're already following the show, you are David, not Goliath. If not, find a slingshot stat. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for on with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to on with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.
- [52:03]
Cristobal Valenzuela
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Kara Swisher
Save yourself money today. Increase your wealth.
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Cristobal Valenzuela
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