00:00:07 · Adam Miller, Sachin, Anastasis Germanidis
[00:00:07] S0: One, [00:00:08] S1: one. We're sitting here in [00:00:13] S0: And we're about to head to the office of RunwayML to meet with cofounder and co CEO, Anastasis Germanidis. Runway is somewhat of a black sheep in the AI space. It's a company not founded by Silicon Valley prodigies, but instead by three self described failed filmmakers. [00:00:29] S2: I decided I wanted to, you know, become an artist, go to New York, go to art school. [00:00:36] S0: However, Runway believes that video generation is just the first step. With the release of the general world model marking a shift in their focus from taking on Hollywood to tackling real time physics simulation. [00:00:47] S2: Yeah. Runway is being used in film. It's being used in in marketing and and advertising. It's being used in in games, architecture, but the the the applications are far broader than that. We're seeing our models already being used in physical AI and robotics. [00:01:03] S0: With world models, do you think we'll be able to solve a lot more problems? [00:01:07] S2: The bottleneck to scientific progress or a big bottleneck is less on building this, you know, genius artificial scientists. It's more about running experiments quickly. [00:01:19] S1: Do you think there's a risk that you go away from, like, the core creativity that's at the harder runway if there's applications in, like, all these hard real world problems? [00:01:32] S2: Yeah. I mean, Anastasis, good to meet you. Nice to meet you. Nice to have you here. First.
00:01:32 · Anastasis Germanidis, Sachin, Adam Miller
[00:01:32] S2: Yeah. I mean, Anastasis, good to meet you. Nice to meet you. Nice to have you here. First. [00:01:38] S1: Excited for this episode. Yeah. Do you wanna just introduce yourself and your role at the company? [00:01:44] S2: Yeah. I'm Anastasis. I'm co founder and co CEO at Runway, where we focus a lot on furthering video generation and world model research. [00:01:54] S0: Yeah, we're just saying that this is such a beautiful and tasteful office. We go to a lot of startup offices, but this one feels a little bit different. [00:02:02] S2: Yep, we try to make it match the culture and mission of the company. [00:02:05] S1: Yeah, it feels really like manifestation of the culture you're trying to create and probably of you as a person. Right? This this interest of technology and the filmmaking together. And before we started rolling, we were kind of discussing how you're in San Francisco, the Bay Area, and you actually decided to quit tech and become a filmmaker. Can you kind of tell us a little bit about that moment?
00:02:26 · Anastasis Germanidis
[00:02:26] S2: Yeah. So so right out of college, so I studied computer science. I was, you know, I was... I've been programming since I was 10. So it felt like the a natural thing for me to just go into San Francisco and in the tech world right after graduating, but I did find like there was a level of like a monoculture and a way of building things that were like I really always like to turn my ideas into projects and like had like always you know growing up like 20 to 30 different projects going on at any given point and what I saw in San Francisco when I lived there right after graduating was there was kind of this intense kind of drive to like start a company and commercialize everything you're working on and I really for a long time I really you know what I cared the most about was just this idea of like really turning my ideas into projects and really caring about the craft of like software and the craft of creating things and so decided to and and I also like technology as as a way of like building technology as a way of questioning and as a way of really thinking through like, you know, how does these things that we're building like kind of change society? How how how how how does technology kind of can create like... How how does creating things basically help empower people, give people tools to allow them to do something they couldn't do before. So it felt like there was a big pressure to create a company around everything that you're creating, But I I felt I I would need more time to explore basically. And so I decided I wanted to, you know, become an artist, go to New York, go to art school, figure out, kind of explore and figure out like what I wanna really focus my life more on versus trying to be in the tech world from the get go.:
00:04:37 · Adam Miller, Anastasis Germanidis
[00:04:37] S0: And did you have deep artistic influences growing up? Were you particularly drawn to say film or literature or painting or something? [00:04:46] S2: Yeah, too many. So I was I mean as an adolescent I was spending kind of all my time a mix of coding, writing poetry and making music. I didn't have a good way of combining all those things. I started trying to combine them in college actually. Made one of my first projects was using a technique at that point that was very popular in ML and AI called genetic algorithms to figure out how do you make a system that can draw pictures of faces. But it was extremely early at the time, so it took quite a bit of time, I think, before image generation got there. But yeah, was always very interested in this idea of like systems that can create art, systems that can draw, that can kind of help with a creative expression. [00:05:37] S0: So the founders of Runway don't really have the storied Silicon Valley foundation model typical backgrounds. You've instead described yourselves as three failed filmmakers. How did you all come together to actually build this company?
00:05:37 · Adam Miller, Anastasis Germanidis
[00:05:37] S0: So the founders of Runway don't really have the storied Silicon Valley foundation model typical backgrounds. You've instead described yourselves as three failed filmmakers. How did you all come together to actually build this company? [00:05:51] S2: Yeah. So it's it's interesting because what we found out, and that wasn't something we discussed originally, but like all three of us had some kind of initial contact with the world of film and initial attempt to enter it. I originally, when I went to college, I wanted to study filmmaking and neuroscience. Those were the... I wanted to get away from coding and computer science and just focus more on kind of those two areas. And I quickly found out that the... Well, I like the idea of making films and I, you know, I I wrote screenplays. I I was kind of trying to kind of work in that world. The It was less of like the, you know, being on set and being a director and like really creating films was not like the thing that I would enjoy the most. And I think that's, you know, there is similar stories with my co founders of either going to study film or making... Having side jobs of making videos. So we always were very inspired by the world of filmmaking, very inspired by film. I did a bunch of, like, collaborations with filmmakers where I saw the way they were working and kind of wanted to figure out how those... How to use technology to help them. But, yeah, we ended up arriving at the world from from a different direction.
00:07:25 · Sachin
[00:07:25] S1: And take us to the specific moment when you realized that you could build video generation models. Because I think something interesting in studying the background of the company is that you guys were actually quite early to this. I would have assumed that you started in 2022 after kind of the chat GPT moment, but you guys started way before that. Can you talk us through how that moment came about?