Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:31:45 · Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alexa von Tobel
[00:31:45] S0: Yes. And and to to that same point, when when photography was around, to your point of labels and words, we, society didn't have the words to describe what they were seeing. And so they thought of photography as, and this is true as, as mirrors with memories, because it was, if you think about photography, it's kind of that. It's a mirror. It's reflecting reality. It's capturing reality, but it's like saving it in time. And then eventually we come up with this idea of photography and the language of photography and all the things that came after it. But it wasn't that someone was like, oh, you know what? I'm gonna invent photography. It was like a bunch of people and scientists from mid eighteen hundreds experimenting with chemicals, reactions and physical and physical materials and realizing that this... That was at the time mostly a medium to understand movement and like scientific progress was effectively meant to be used as storytelling. I think the most compelling use cases of cameras these days is storytelling. And, and then maybe there's an argument to be said that all technologies are somehow a form of storytelling eventually. And I think this case is actually very similar, which is like AI is just becoming another form of storytelling and, you know, our continuous evolution of storytelling as a as a society altogether. [00:32:55] S1: Let's dream a bit about the future of advertising. [00:32:58] S0: Sure.
00:32:58 · Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alexa von Tobel
[00:32:58] S0: Sure. [00:32:59] S1: And I remember a thesis talk that I watched you give, and it's so easy when you can see some of the videos, and you're just like, wow. Oh my god. Like, the advertising could foundationally just change for us. Can you just talk a little bit about kind of what you see the future of advertising could look like?
00:33:19 · Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:33:19] S0: Well, it depends on the scale and then the timescale that you're thinking about. There... There's a world where you can think about, well, what happens if you just keep extrapolating the... And and thinking about the obvious next iteration of where the signal is going? Advertisers and advertising, if you think about it from a base level, it's also about, it's a story. It's, it's someone wants to tell your story you can buy into that story and hopefully buy a product or a service. Right. That that's the goal. And the tricky part is, well, what story do you tell? How do you tell that story? Where do you put that story? And that's, that's marketing, that's distribution. That's like ads. Right. There's not going to be a world, if I can, if I can run that process automatically in a personalized way, hyper specific, I can create the most compelling stories for you to engage with my product or service. And I can do it in such a way that I'm probably like skipping any intermiliary, any step in between that will allow me to get to my audience the fastest. And I think a lot of people are thinking about this, which is if you're already watching a screen, you're already in front of a piece of media or an ad or something, I could effectively generate something that will like immediately be specific to you. And I can do it with an agent or a combination of agents that will know what's best for you based on who you are. Now that's an extreme kind of case and there might be some benefits and some downsides of that. And, and, but I think directionally that's where the world is heading, to be honest. And advertising is not too far from being transformed at its most fundamental level because of agents being able to do all of the work that now we're doing through different people and through different companies.
00:35:03 · Alexa von Tobel, Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:35:03] S1: So instead of... I'll I'll just make up an example. Instead of Budweiser maybe having two or three ads that they run-in a month, hypothetically, they could have 30,000 ads that they run where you see an ad. I... I'm a mom of three kids. It's showing a crazy household, and it's like, do you want a beer? Correct. But to your point, it's hyper personalized, fully generative, n of one content because the video is now effectively free to make, and an agent can have a data file on me and a data file on you and generate both of those videos instantly. [00:35:44] S0: Correct. [00:35:45] S1: That's pretty cool. Are there any downsides to that world?
00:35:45 · Alexa von Tobel, Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:35:45] S1: That's pretty cool. Are there any downsides to that world? [00:35:50] S0: Of course. Of course, of course the downsides there. There are upsides and downsides of everything. I don't think nothing is like a zero sum game. I don't think it's nothing about just like all the things that we'll gain. And of course you can think about the consequence of hyper personalization. You can think about, there's an argument of like shared culture and like shared experiences. I don't, I don't think everyone has a full answer around like what will change and what will keep being the same. I do generally think of myself as an optimist being like, there's going to be a lot of things that we'll have to like reassess, but effectively society has always found a way. We've, we, we had this with the internet where like a lot of people were freaking out early on about many of the same things in like a different scale where what happens when people have access to information so freely and people might self organize to like do X, Y, or Z. And the truth is that might still happen, but like the collective outcome and positive impact of the internet has been probably like way worth it than like the 1% trying to find like way, bad ways of using it. And I think for, I think like personalized advertising is like a form. It's like one of the many ways that you can use technology, and there's positive aspects of it. And then I got this, I think we'll just have to figure out how to manage together as a society.
00:37:06 · Alexa von Tobel, Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:37:06] S1: I agree with everything you just said, which is the benefits are probably dramatically outweighing the costs, and we'll have to navigate that. I wanna dig more into that in a second, but I just wanna ask one other thing. If you think about the thing you're most excited about right now that you can see and, like, just the thing that's, like, kind of stuck in your brain and really lighting you up, Cristobal, what would that be? Like, what part of this future vision is the most motivating and thrilling for you? [00:37:37] S0: May... Maybe because it's fresh on my mind and it's very close to me. It's... I'm thinking about, again, my, my, my, my sisters and my brother of like them becoming users of, Runway and our product. And I think the, the biggest, kind of subtext there is there's billions, I don't know, like there's billions of people out there that are waiting and have this latent set of, expressions and ideas and things they want to tell the world that they haven't been able to. And where I get the most excited is like you, we started opening the floods to many people to start communicating things they just weren't able to communicate before because they didn't have the tools to. And I think it's the beginning of an kind of explosion of sorts in terms of that creative world. And that excites me, excites me a lot. I think there's many more people out there that are waiting for these things to just be around the corner so they can tell stories and share their perspective of the world in ways they couldn't do before.