Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela wants Hollywood to embrace AI video

Today, I’m talking with Runway CEO and cofounder Cris Valenzuela. This one’s special: Cris and I were live at an event in New York City last month hosted by Alix Partners, so you’ll hear the audience in the background from time to time. Runway is one of the leading AI video generation platforms. The basic concept is familiar by now: you start with a reference image — either something you’ve created using Runway’s own model or something you upload — you type in a prompt, and Runway spits out a fully formed video sequence. But what’s most interesting to me about Runway is that while the AI hype is at a fever pitch right now, there’s a little more depth to the company. Cris founded the company back in 2018, so he’s been through some boom-and-bust periods in AI, and you’ll hear that experience come through as we talk about the technology and what it can and can’t do. When Cris began to more seriously explore AI video generation, as a researcher at New York University, we still mostly ref ... Read full article.