Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:21:25 · Alexa von Tobel, Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:21:25] S1: When you think of some of the more surprising ways that Runway is being used, what are some of the ways that kind of surprised you to see the product in the wild? [00:21:35] S0: Oh, there there are many. I think, I recently crossed a threshold where, I I have three brothers, and the three of them have been using Runway every day since the last... For the last couple of weeks. And that was, like, a nice surprising moment because they're not... I'm... One of my brothers... My brother works in, like, media and advertising, so I felt more of a natural fit for him to use it. But my two sisters are like an architect and like a teacher, and so I was never expecting them to use Runway, and now they use it every day. Which is, which is great. Like my sister is using it to like teach classes and help their students like engage with content. My sister is like visualizing like the designs she's been doing for her clients. [00:22:14] S1: Wow.
00:22:14 · Alexa von Tobel, Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:22:14] S1: Wow. [00:22:14] S0: And you have like hundreds, if not thousands, probably like millions of use cases that are similar to that, which are things you've, you might not even like consider are useful because they're different from your day to day like world. But they're very useful for many people. I mean, have use cases of Runway for for music videos, for like learning, for medical teaching. There's like people using it for architecture, for design, for filmmaking, for for many other things that I think we never thought of when we started, but that's kind of the point. It means that these general purpose systems are becoming more usable as the models have progressed. And so probably there's still a long way to go. [00:22:54] S1: As these tools that you're building continue to improve, and obviously, there's sort of a asymmetric curve in terms of just the power and the potential. It's gonna continue to get better faster. But what performs best today in the Runway algorithms? Like, what... What's working extremely well? [00:23:17] S0: What do you mean in terms of products. [00:23:19] S1: What type of video creation? Like, give us some of the examples of things that are just kind of stunningly beautiful and powerful.
00:23:19 · Alexa von Tobel, Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:23:19] S1: What type of video creation? Like, give us some of the examples of things that are just kind of stunningly beautiful and powerful. [00:23:27] S0: Well, I mean, it's hard. I mean, it's... The models are very flexible. They can do a lot of different things and different art styles. I think long form content is becoming more feasible. Like, we used to create, like, again, like, single images and, like, shorter videos and then longer form content. Now I think artistically it's less of a problem. I think the con the pro the, the biggest challenges you can think of like consistent forms and styles, not being solved, but being very close to solve. What's the hardest days is motion and physics and consistency in like long form content. That's, I would say that where we need to put perhaps the most research on time to make sure it works as, as it should. [00:24:06] S1: Can you imagine a future where someone sitting on Runway, like, wins a solo Oscar? Like, is that Yeah. [00:24:14] S0: Absolutely. That's, like, hopefully a couple years away from now, hopefully less. [00:24:20] S1: I were that early small investor in Suno AI, and they... You know, people started creating literally award winning content and music. So I imagine the analogies here are very similar. Are we there? Like, could that happen right now almost?
00:24:39 · Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:24:39] S0: Yeah. I mean, I think the the question there is not if it can happen, it's more how we'll position and well prepare our institutions for that, Which is not a question of like, if it can, it's like why and when, you know? Look, I can make, people are making incredibly like compelling videos and stories with fully, they're fully synthetic or fully generated or a mix of like real live action and also generated. And it's just really good. Just really good. I think there's natural like tendency from institutions to try to reject it first. And that actually for me is like a great Absolutely. Yeah. It's a great sign. Again, you look at the history of art, that's been like the trend when new generations like question that that's at the school and the establishment is to, they're going to get rejected. That actually like was what like impressionism was at the time. It was a rejected art and they've, they formed the Salon of the Rejected to show their own work. And eventually like that rejected became like the norm. And I think that cycle keeps on repeating where like the establishment that has been like dominating, like the art culture, like sets what the principles and the standards are. And then newer generations question that and make things in ways that are not supposed to be made. And then they kind of effectively end up winning. And, and then you do it again and again and again. And so when I've, I think we're at a point where like, you can make incredibly compelling, like incredibly compelling music and content and videos and films and ads and whatever you want. It's how we want to like treat it that like will matter the most. And I think it's probably institutions already adapting to that.
00:26:24 · Alexa von Tobel, Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:26:24] S1: That's beautifully said, which is when you're really pushing the boundaries of the status quo, it's... The the first ending is rejection. Right. And that a [00:26:34] S0: great sign. [00:26:35] S1: Which is a great sign. Okay. Question. I wanna shift to the future. You are uniquely positioned to see what the world could look like as somebody who's on the bleeding edge of this. So as these models move towards real time generation where video isn't rendered or edited but fully generated live, what does that change? And and I'll give just some examples of what went through my head. But, like, as we think about the future of gaming or entertainment or even advertising, can you just, like, stretch our thinking, Cristóbal, to, like, what you see as, like, kind of wild out there possibilities that happen when there is no editing, there's no cleanup. It's just in real time, all of us could be viewing something totally different and unique.
00:27:26 · Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:27:26] S0: Yeah. It's, I mean, it's hard to predict because you have to, like, be there to see it. And I think a lot of it will be shaped by people more than any other company. So it's less about us and anyone else saying like, are the four or five things. You need to think about it as a general purpose medium. Like the many use cases of the camera were not driven by one person, it will, was driven by decades of experimentation and tinkering and putting things in different places. I think we're real time. We're gonna, we're already experiencing a version of the same, which of course you can think about the obvious ones. Gaming is kind of like around the corner. You can create very interactive, interesting, playable experiences with real time models. Then you can think about tutoring and like live experiences where you're to have a version of this, Imagine I'm, I was actually, I did a, I did an example of this when I was chatting with like Socrates and like Aristotle, so you can just like discuss things and you're immersed in a conversation that you just couldn't do before. And it feels very natural because you're both seeing each other. You're, you're, you're kind of reading like the, the, the, the way I'm saying things. You can read the way they're saying things. You can think about that. You can think about like companions. Like there's many opportunities for people to have someone in their side, onto their side when they're doing things they haven't done before, when they're alone. And there's many interesting use cases that I think we're just like starting to grasp and begin to experiment with. Because it's early, these models specifically in real time, we have a, like a model that we released a couple months ago called characters that allows you to run a conversational agent and, and a, and a model in that, in that domain. It's only a couple weeks old. And so it's very early, early beginnings of that new real time world.