Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
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.
00:37:37 · Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alexa von Tobel
[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. [00:38:39] S1: So with any new medium, and obviously with everything around Anthropic and Mythos, there's been, like, a lot of talk about responsibility. As somebody who is really on the forefront of an entire medium shift, Just how do you think about what to be most thoughtful and cautious about as you think about the responsibility of this wave of innovation? Thoughts there.
00:39:04 · Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:39:04] S0: Well, I think thinking about model development and technology in such a way that doesn't feel isolated by one culture or one industry, I think when you think about AI as one of these rare general purpose technologies that has to be looked from different like vantage points. And if you only think about it from like a tech perspective, you're missing out on so many other domains of humans society and And I think what's missing the most these days is kind of like popping that like bubble a little bit and being like, well, this is not, it's kind of the joke people do with or make with when, when people design too many things in California or like, I don't know, think about like the weather app, you know, so most perfect in California. So all the weather apps are always just like shiny and like sunny and everything is like thought to be using like this perfect weather. If you go to any other part of the world, like the weather is like crazy and unpredictable. And so the apps sometimes are not thought for like people outside of California because a lot of the people who design these apps are in California, but the weather doesn't operate in the way California operates. But we somehow have all kind of thought and have to be fit into like the way California thinks. And I think with AI, we actually have to break that mold a lot more and have way more different perspectives of the world because the technology and the impact will be more massive than than any other app we've built before.
00:40:25 · Alexa von Tobel, Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:40:25] S1: That's a great example, by the way, which is that if California is making a weather app, it's mainly sunny all the time. As someone who's sitting in New York with you right now, goddamn cold outside today, and it's almost May. [00:40:38] S0: But I think the iPhone app was never meant for cold and climate, so it never warns you or tells you like seeing if it's gonna rain, it's hard. And it's like, is it gonna rain or is it probably raining? Like, can you just tell me? Yes. That's right. People probably in California is like, why do you care about raining? It's like never raining. It's like... [00:40:55] S1: Yeah. Like send me a text last night that's like, please bring your winter coat today because we're having a shift. Are you worried about, like, massive job loss in the next decade, Cristobal? Like, how do you think about that as a... I I mean, it's so clear from this conversation that you are an incredibly thoughtful, and you're almost like historian of technology in the way that you think about what you're developing. How do you think about just some of the stuff that's terrifying people right now?