AI tools are disrupting all types of creative content, and Runway AI is a pioneer making major waves in Hollywood. It’s partnering with the likes of Disney and Netflix to revolutionize production. Runway’s co-founder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela joins Rapid Response to dissect the company’s breakneck growth, the risks and responsibilities of AI tool makers, and how AI is redefining both business expectations and our notion of creativity. Cristóbal also reveals why he rebuffed advances from Meta for a highly lucrative acquisition, and how AI video is just a stepping stone to an entirely new media format — one more expansive and transportive than we can realistically comprehend today.
About Cristóbal
- CEO & co-founder of Runway, a leading AI research & technology company
- Pioneered industry-changing AI video tools used by Netflix, Disney, and top creators (2025)
- Rejected Meta's reported acquisition offer, choosing to advance Runway's independent vision (2025)
- Former researcher at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, specializing in technology and art
- Guides foundational research for multimodal simulators and next-gen creative platforms
Table of Contents:
- The rapidly improving landscape of AI video
- Will AI tools ever be able to generate a complete film?
- Embracing AI as a new creative medium
- How Hollywood is using Runway's tools
- Hollywood & the AI taboo
- How other industries are using Runway's tools
- Navigating the risks and responsibilities of AI video
- Why Runway didn't sell to Meta
- The death of the quarterly product roadmap
- From AI video to creating fully immersive virtual worlds
- Does it matter if we don't know whether a video is generated by AI?
Transcript:
Hollywood’s hottest AI partner
CRISTÓBAL VALENZUELA: If you look at the history of art, every time there’s a breakthrough in technology, there’s a breakthrough in art, and that helps us understand the world better. It helps artists communicate things they never could communicate before. Change is hard. You’re afraid of it. These are very unpredictable times for the good and the bad. I think the best state of mind is to understand that yeah, change is the only constant these days.
BOB SAFIAN: That’s Cris Valenzuela, CEO of Runway, the AI video tools pioneer. If you haven’t seen the videos being created via AI today, you’re missing some extraordinary stuff. You’re also missing out on one of the most contentious areas of AI impact from Hollywood Studios to the marketing world. While Runway has competitors like Google’s Veo 3 and OpenAI’s Sora, the company is experiencing break-neck growth. It has high-profile partnerships with the likes of Netflix and Disney, and its tools are being adopted by individual creators as well as everyday people. In our conversation, Cris talks about how AI is redefining both business expectations and our notion of creativity. He shares why he rebuffed advances from Meta for a huge payday acquisition and how today’s AI video tools are a stepping stone to a totally new media format. Whether you’re personally playing around with AI video tools, or you’re fearful of increasingly sophisticated video deep fakes, Cris is a hands-on guide to the rapidly unfolding future. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.
[THEME MUSIC]
I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Cris Valenzuela, co-founder and CEO of Runway. Cris, thanks for being here.
VALENZUELA: Thank you for having me here.
Copy LinkThe rapidly improving landscape of AI video
SAFIAN: I have to say the past few months I have become low-key obsessed with AI-created video. Well, maybe not that low-key. I keep seeing these mind-blowing video clips. It feels like there’s been this inflection point in the tools and the usage. You released your Gen-4 model not long ago. You had your Aleph video editing tool come out.
VALENZUELA: Correct.
SAFIAN: And there are these other tools out there too now, Google’s Veo 3 which I see folks using. Of course, there’s OpenAI’s Sora, Midjourney. What’s the difference between all these? I mean, are you all utilizing similar engines, or are all these things popping up now because the compute has reached a certain place?
VALENZUELA: It’s a combination of things. I mean, we’ve been working on this for almost seven, eight years, so there’s a lot that we’ve learned after being alone and building this. I would say these days it’s becoming more evident to many that the models are getting pretty good at tackling and doing a lot of different things, and so that becomes interesting for obvious business reasons. All models are different. I think all models are trained for different reasons. We tend to focus on professionals and folks who want to make great videos. This amazing model we’ve released only recently, just a couple of weeks ago, allows you to modify and create video using an existing video. That was never possible before. And so those kinds of breakthroughs are just allowing, I guess, way more people to do much more interesting things.
SAFIAN: I mean, your tools, I saw you in another video use voice prompts to create a video scene. Your tools generate camera angles and change objects. The extending a scene outward, filling in what isn’t there is amazing. The switching on the lights video that you have, just for those who are listening–
VALENZUELA: It’s pretty cool.
SAFIAN: In this video, we see a cityscape, and then street lamps come on, and the windows of office and apartment buildings start blinking, and the lights are switching on and off in this very choreographed sequence. Can you explain how that was created?
VALENZUELA: It took us less than an hour to make that video, and you start with a scene, an initial video, and then you ask Runway for things you want to change in that video. And so, we could ask if it’s daylight, we can ask the model, “Just show me a night version of that same scene.” And so what the model will do is it will understand what’s in that scene, and it will turn down the light metaphorically, but also literally we’ll just turn day into night, while maintaining pretty much the consistency for everything else. You might turn on the lights of the streets. And you can be much more specific. You can be “Only turn the lights on the left,” or “Only turn the streetlights while keeping everything else dark.” You can be like, “Now start turning the lights one by one, starting from the one on the left to the one on the right.”
So in a way, it’s editing reality. Maybe you can think about it like that. You have an existing piece of content and you’re working through that content with AI, asking it to modify it in whatever way you want, which is really fun to be honest. It’s something I think we’ve never had the chance of doing ever before, and so it’s really fun to play with.
Copy LinkWill AI tools ever be able to generate a complete film?
SAFIAN: I’ve played with Runway a little. It’s awesome, but I can’t write a single natural language prompt and get a full film yet. I mean, there is craft and discipline to getting these tools to work at their potential. I mean, are we going to get to the point where all you need to create a film is the idea for it? The vision and the production itself is all automatic?
VALENZUELA: I think a great concept of what you mentioned was tools. This is a tool. It’s a very powerful tool, and this tool allows you to do things that you couldn’t do before. Knowing how to use the tool would always be important, and the tool is not going to do work on its own if you don’t know how to wield the tool, how to use it in interesting ways. And so I guess the answer for the question of will we ever get to a point where you can just prompt something and get exactly what you want? I guess the answer is kind of-ish. Depends on how good you know how to use the tool.
I think about what tools people are using today to make films, like a camera. Can a camera help you win an Oscar? Of course. If you have a camera, will you win an Oscar? No. What makes a great filmmaker is like, well, knowing where to point the camera, knowing how the camera works and functions and how you can tell a story with a camera. And I think that’s no different from how we think about AI tools and Runway specifically, which is it can help you go very far. You can do amazing things with it. You just have to learn how to think with it and work with it. And if you know, then you’ll get far.
Copy LinkEmbracing AI as a new creative medium
SAFIAN: I saw an AI video this morning from director Matt Zien called Forgive the Haters. I don’t know if you’ve seen this or not, but —
VALENZUELA: No, I have not.
SAFIAN: –it’s this commentary of how traditional media folks and image experts, people who are trained in this are being usurped by this new technology, and it’s both scary and encouraging, which feels like the way people’s reactions to this tool are.
VALENZUELA: Yeah, well, I think it’s not new to be honest. I think we have some sort of social amnesia where we sometimes forget things we’ve lived through in the past. Filmmaking was very misunderstood by painters because we ask painters to judge a completely new medium, and so when painters were judging photography or moving pictures, they were seeing through the lenses of oils and pigments and brushes, and they were like, “Well, photography will never ever get close to what I can express with a paintbrush.” It’s just a different medium. You need to understand that it works differently and to think about it differently.
And I think something similar is happening today where we’re asking the painters of our times to judge and analyze this new thing, and they’re going to analyze it through the lens of what they know. I think the invitation we’ve been trying to encourage people to think about is, it’s best to think about this as a new medium. It’s best to think about this as what the camera was to painting. And you’re going to get the most value out of it if you break the assumptions of what expectations you have for this thing based on the past. That I think for me is the way you move forward and the way that, to be honest, most of the best filmmakers we work with, it takes them a while to realize this, but after you realize and cross that custom to understand that this is a new medium, you start unlocking amazing things.
Copy LinkHow Hollywood is using Runway’s tools
SAFIAN: You mentioned work that you do with studios in Hollywood. I know you’ve partnered with Netflix and Disney and AMC networks and whatever. How are they using Runway’s AI today? Because AI can be a little bit of a dirty secret in Hollywood. People are using it, but they don’t always want to admit it.
VALENZUELA: Yeah, I think it’s a tool that’s the answer. And so the best studios and the best folks in Hollywood have realized that, and they’re using it in their workflows to combine them with other things they know pretty well. The thing is that there are no rules. You can start inventing them right now. I mean, Aleph is a couple weeks old, and so people are figuring out things and ways of using the technology that we never thought possible, and that’s what I enjoy the most. It’s a general purpose technology. It can be used in ways that are diverse and creative and unique, and if you’re creative enough, you’re going to uncover those things.
SAFIAN: At some point in the future, there may be a whole different medium about the way you do it. Right now, I can imagine they take ideas and they create essentially a prototype of a film to show to get ideas through. Is that part of how it’s used?
VALENZUELA: You can think about, broadly speaking, in two stages. There’s pre-production and post-production. Pre-production is, well, writing the script and doing art direction and selecting characters and casting and location scouting and just preparing to make the stuff. And so there’s many use cases of Runway in there. Of course, the obvious ones are storyboarding and helping you with writing the script and helping you with casting characters and seeing how they’re going to behave and what they’re going to do.
And then in post, once you film or we record something, there’s a lot of visual effects and things that you need to apply and change to the videos themselves. And so let’s say the example that we were speaking before, turning day into night. Let’s say you’ve recorded something and it happens to be that someone changed the script later and the shot that you recorded had to happen at night. Well, the way you would do it before was that you had to go back and shoot again and spend more time and fly the actors again and do the whole thing. Or now you can go into Runway and just ask the model to turn that scene into night, and it will do it for you. So it’s less of them coming to Runway and typing, “Get me a multi-award winning film now, fast and cheap,” and more about, well, I have this problem, it’s very expensive to solve. I have a tool now that can help me do it faster and better. Can I use it? Will it make my movie? No, but it will help you very much in getting there faster and cheaper.
Copy LinkHollywood & the AI taboo
SAFIAN: There was some hubbub at the Oscars about AI used in The Brutalist. Are we past that taboo now? Is that not going to happen anymore?
VALENZUELA: Yeah, I think we are. I mean, look, it’s new. It’s misunderstood. I always argue that AI is like a mirror these days because it’s such a generalizable technology. It can be applicable to many different things which make it so that we can project into it anything we want. So in a way, the way we look at this technology is a reflection or a mirror of how we look at the world. And so the people who are very excited about the world, new generations of creatives, they want to unshackle from whatever they’ve done before and how their world works and have all the great liberties, it’s the most freedom they’ve ever had. They can just make stuff without asking for permission. For the people who’ve been in the industry for many, many, many, many years and want to not change anything of it, it’s like revolution. You want to prevent revolution from happening. Or maybe you want to encourage it, depending on what’s your mindset. If you’re scared, AI might become a perfect way of mirroring that scariness of the world. And so it becomes some sort of a reflection of sorts.
But I think part of moving away from that is having people really experience and using AI in their day-to-day lives. If you’ve never used video models or AI image models, if you’ve never seen how it works, there’s only one answer to forming an opinion on something you’ve never used, which is use it. And look, again, this is very new. Some models are a couple of weeks old, and so it’s hard for people to fully get on board on things that are moving so fast. But I think over time people have gotten better at it. I mean, Hollywood has gotten really good at understanding both the limitations and the challenges, and that happens just because you’re more exposed to it.
Copy LinkHow other industries are using Runway’s tools
SAFIAN: Outside of Hollywood, Runway works with a lot of big corporations, Fortune 100 companies for their marketing efforts. Is there less pushback compared to the film world because traditions of quote, “art” are a little less precious?
VALENZUELA: I think every industry has a different set of concerns or challenges that you have to manage and work with. Game studios have different set of things you need to make sure you can solve for. And we sell a lot to architects, for example, and architects have also different standards and workflows and things they want to see into the products. I think they all work slightly different, but the interesting thing is that you can help them all. If the models are good enough and they can generalize, you can solve them all.
SAFIAN: And the same tool could work across?
VALENZUELA: If you think about the challenge of an architect to render a video for a client showing them a building, what they’re trying to achieve is not that hard and similar from what a filmmaker is trying to achieve when they’re rendering a building for a Superman movie. They’re using different tools, but that’s because historically those things have been separated.
But now if my model can help you and learn how to do both, then you can help with the same product, with the same experience, the same underlying model. Solve for those two use cases, which is wild because then there’s no verticalization of software they have to do. They don’t have to do specific UIs. Just train better models. And if you train better models, a lot of things will happen.
SAFIAN: A lot of things will happen and a lot of things are already happening. I’m thinking back to the statement Cris made, “There are no rules.” It’s both exciting and daunting. And given that, what kind of responsibility does Runway feel it has for making sure its AI video tools aren’t used for deceptive purposes? And how far out does Cris plan Runway’s business in an environment that’s so dynamic? We’ll talk about that plus why he walked away from a potential acquisition by Meta after the break. Stay with us.
[AD BREAK]
Before the break, Runway’s Cris Valenzuela shared how the company’s AI video tools are disrupting Hollywood and the very idea of creativity. Now he talks about the risks and responsibilities of AI tool makers, why Runway resets its roadmap weekly, and how today’s video AI tools are just a stepping stone to something much, much bigger. Let’s dive back in.
Copy LinkNavigating the risks and responsibilities of AI video
I have to say personally I get torn because as you can tell — I love the creative output in AI video and the possibilities, and, at the same time, there are possibilities that scare me a little bit about uses, about job impacts, about unintended consequences. How concerned are you about people using your tools for deep fakes and scams? I mean, I saw one news report about legal experts worried that videos in the courtroom will be harder to trust as evidence. Do you feel like this stuff is your responsibility to protect against, or you’re just a tool maker, and it’s not really your role to get into those use cases?
VALENZUELA: I think it’s a social responsibility to bring everyone up to speed and help people navigate through what are the good and the positive and the great outcomes, and what are the things that we should be preventing for? And this happens with every technology. Think about cars. I mean, cars that are amazing has gotten us to do a lot culturally and socially. There’s also great dangers in cars, and so we put norms and safety and seat belts, and we require you to get a driver’s license. There’s all these things we’ve collectively built together to understand that this powerful technology can get us very far with the right safeguards, and it’s not the responsibility of a company or one person as much as society as a whole to first recognize the importance of the technology itself and then understand where it can be either improved or prevented for enemy’s uses.
Copy LinkWhy Runway didn’t sell to Meta
SAFIAN: At the same time as you’re managing this technology shift, you’re also managing a business shift. I mean, your business is growing very fast. I know that Meta reportedly approached Runway about an acquisition earlier this year before spending $14 billion on Scale AI. Aside from the money, what sorts of calculations go through your mind in considering whether to stay independent?
VALENZUELA: I think I’m having too much fun, to be honest. I care too much about this. I think we’ll be a mess if we sell the company now, mostly because we know exactly or we have a good sense of, I think, extrapolating where things are going to go in terms of performance of models and qualities and use cases that I want to be the one building it. I mean, that’s what we’ve gotten here, and there’s such a big opportunity to make the world much more creative, help artists tell stories that we haven’t told before, and I want to be the one leading that with my own vision and being an owner of my own destiny in a way. So yeah, it’s too fun.
SAFIAN: With the AI tools evolving so fast, it can be hard to anticipate where the puck is moving to. And I’m curious, how much are you like, “Yeah, I know what I’m building toward, it’s this vision,” versus how much has to be reactive and adaptive that you can’t know.
VALENZUELA: You build some sort of intuition over time, I would say. Again, I think this happens with, think about the best athletes. I think Djokovic was speaking about this in an interview very recently where he knows when and how to hit a ball without having to think about it because his body has been trained for years for that. And every time he thinks about it, he fails because he gets too much into his head and starts overthinking it. But if he doesn’t think about it, he just knows because his body has been trained for that.
I think as an organization we’ve been trained for years to understand what works, what doesn’t work, where things are heading, what’s worth paying attention to, what’s worth focusing research on, and that intuition is very valuable. Specifically when the world moves so fast, there’s so much information you have to digest that if you don’t have a good sense of what signal versus what noise, you’re just going to have a hard time parsing and understanding what’s worth paying attention to. I think that, for us, is incredibly important. It’s more of an art and a science to be honest, and it has to do with just being good at learning and having that experience.
Copy LinkThe death of the quarterly product roadmap
SAFIAN: And how far out do you think of your product roadmap, or is that something you’re reassessing all the time?
VALENZUELA: Yeah, I mean, it’s a weekly thing to be honest. If you’re planning on a quarterly basis, you’re not going to make it. I strongly believed that for many years, and I think that’s evident now for public companies. If you’re planning on an eight month long process, you’re done. In four weeks, you’re going to get leapfrogged and things will change. We have long-term ambitions and we have long-term ambitions of where things, we need to take them.
We’ve historically taken this open-ended research approach, which is, you can think about it as, instead of defining very specific goals you want to accomplish, you define the boundaries on which you want the team to play and experiment. And then setting the boundaries and the limits is the hard thing because if it’s too open, then there’s nothing really directionally happening. If it’s too broad, then it’s just an objective that’s very clear. If it’s broad enough and has enough of the right incentives, then people are going to stumble on things that are new, that you’ve never thought of before, that have a great value. And those are the things that we care the most. That open-ended research approach that’s less focused by goals, but much more by stepping stones of discovery and learning.
SAFIAN: It’s like a changed definition of the way a lot of start-ups begin. Usually there’s a customer need or a pain point or a use case that you’re trying to solve for. And what you’re talking about is, it’s a very different way of approaching it, because you don’t even know what you’re going to be solving for.
VALENZUELA: Yeah, it’s very different. Again, you have to recognize the speed of technology and how fast things are changing. So if you don’t recognize that, I think you’re not being honest with how your plan will change over time. And I think you’re right. Product has historically been very structured and a goal and you’re going to a customer and you know how things are going to go, and overall, you don’t expect things to change that much. I think what’s becoming reality these days is, research and product should become part of the same. If you’re just a research company, you’re going to miss out on product, and there’s no feedback loop from customers. You’re not learning from the real use cases. If it’s just a product company, you’re going to get leapfrogged by research. And again, part of it is you have to be there building those two things together. You have to be willing to try things quickly. I mean, you can build prototypes in a few minutes that used to take you months to build.
SAFIAN: And because you can do that, you should do that. You have to do that.
VALENZUELA: Of course. Someone else will. I mean, if you’re not, someone else will. That’s how businesses in AI go from zero to a billion in a couple of years, even months. That has never happened before. There’s no scale of adoption of technology like that we’ve ever seen before. And again, that’s because models are getting better, performance is getting better, models are improving themselves. It has all these compounding effects. Distribution is also pretty much built, so shipping products to people is pretty straightforward. If you’re thinking about a product roadmap that’s a year long, you’re not going to make it. They’re going to make it because all the assumptions of things you thought were going to be right in January or perhaps in February are already either wrong or obsolete, and so you have to change again. So change is the only constant I would say these days.
Copy LinkFrom AI video to creating fully immersive virtual worlds
SAFIAN: I was reading that you said at one point that AI video is like a stepping stone to creating 3D virtual worlds, what you call the totally new media format. Is this like the metaverse? Is this the next frontier of video gaming? I know you’ve talked about launching an interactive game experience, or is the game stuff just part of the stepping stones that you’re talking about?
VALENZUELA: I think it’s part of the stepping stones. My assumption is that I don’t think we have the language to describe that thing, to be honest, because if you think about linear and non-linear media, linear media being films and ads and videos and things that are, you play them and you play them again, and it’s always the same thing. There’s a way of doing those kind of things that we know pretty well and we can optimize, we can change, we can make it cheaper. We’ll continue doing that. Games are non-linear. Every time you play them, you’re experiencing something slightly different or you can branch and do different stuff. But those worlds and those games have still been created top down. There’s a game designer, a builder, everything has been pre-programmed in some way. So you’re exploring some sort of a world that was pre-designed.
If you think about this idea of getting video or AI models to work in real time, you’re stepping into something perhaps just different from those two mediums. The rules of those worlds have not been prescripted or designed by anyone, they’re just being generated on the go. It’s not linear in the way that you’ve experienced film before because it’s not going to happen probably the same way if you play it again. How do we call that? I don’t know. So we are only going to get to the language to describe this new medium by having people experience it, which is happening right now.
SAFIAN: I saw that Runway’s looking into future revenue streams potentially in robotics and self-driving tech, which surprised me at first, but I suppose this aligns with 3D world mapping, right?
VALENZUELA: Correct, yeah. So if you solve for… Again, it goes back to what I mentioned before, these models can generalize to tasks and things they weren’t specifically trained for, like 3D reconstructions or editing videos. And you can extrapolate that that will continue to happen in different domains, like robotics. One of the hardest things for robots is getting the data to train it on a particular set of tasks. So you have to simulate that data. The way you simulate that data is very expensive. Unless I can just generate the data, simulate it, modify it, alter it. It’s not that different from a movie. It’s just –
SAFIAN: So you’re creating that same movie that you talked about in the beginning with the lights coming on.
VALENZUELA: Yes.
SAFIAN: You take that environment, and you feed it to the robot to train it.
VALENZUELA: Correct. That’s a great example. Think about, you’re training a robot to… You know in LA there’s these robots that do deliveries? You may want to train a robot to understand how light impacts the sensor. And so what you need to do is you just have to show them a bunch of examples of light changing. Well, how do we do that? Well, we have to go into a studio or go into the streets and wait for the light to change, and we’ll create it artificially. Or you can just go into Runway and ask the model to change the light 10,000 times for 10,000 different videos. It’s moving pixels on a screen. Everything that will be moving pixels on a screen will be probably generated with AI very soon.
Copy LinkDoes it matter if we don’t know whether a video is generated by AI?
SAFIAN: And are we going to know the difference between you and I watching each other on video like this, whether that’s us for real, I don’t even know what I mean by real anymore, versus something that’s been constructed or adjusted via AI?
VALENZUELA: I mean, does it matter if I tell you I’m generated and this is a pre-recording? Will it make the conversation less interesting? I’m not, but as a provocative answer, it’s like if people find comfort and it helps them. Think about teaching, for example. Having this conversation with a personal tutor that’s able to answer your questions real time, but also show you physically how things work. Let’s understand physics. So let’s bring something, let’s do an experiment. Now I’m going to show you how it works. That’s great. Why would it care if it’s real or not? I just learned something.
SAFIAN: But a world where I’m not sure what’s real and what’s not doesn’t make you uneasy?
VALENZUELA: When you go to the watch film today in the theaters, do you question if the movies are real or not?
SAFIAN: But I know because it’s a movie, I know that it’s not real, whereas something could hit me in some other way, and it’s not already framed out as being, okay, this is an entertainment experience.
VALENZUELA: But that depends on the format, the medium of how you’re experiencing it. So if I’m tuning into watching something, I’m already tuning myself to understand that what I’m watching is not real. Of course, if I join a Zoom call and the person is deceiving you to pretend they’re real, of course, that’s strange. That’s weird. There should be some disclosure of sorts. But for me, again, that’s a social norm. If you do it, you’re probably like… It’s not going to work. But from a fictional side, from a storytelling perspective, I think we agree on, we like falling for it. You like going to theaters and you know that what you’re seeing is not real.
But here’s the thing. We had this before. One of the first films ever shown is a train arriving to a station in Paris. It’s an old film. It basically shows a train arriving to a station. The story goes that the Lumiere brothers, when they first showed that film in late-1800’s, people run out of the theater and they run because they saw a train arriving to a station. So just, “Run, the train is coming.” We all laugh now, but if you’ve never watched moving pictures on a screen, you’re probably freaking out, until you’ve watched enough where you’re like, “Okay, yeah, I know Superman is not real. People don’t fly. I get it. I don’t like it. I want to go there because it helps me relax or whatever.” Yeah, so I think just exposure also matters.
SAFIAN: I mean, we’re clearly not short of dystopian AI predictions. Do you have a vision of a utopian AI future world?
VALENZUELA: I think I’m more of an optimistic, I think the interesting thing about AI is that we’ve always associated it with science fiction, Terminator and Black Mirror and like HAL 9000 and all the things that are just science fiction. I do see a world, because I’m seeing it right now, where AI becomes an incredibly creative collaborator and a source of excitement and happiness to many people. And I think part of it is you just have to see it pragmatically. You have to see people use it. You have to see how people’s lives have been changed for the good. Of course, there’s misuses and we can prevent them and we’ll work around it as a society. Again, this is a responsibility of everyone, not just one single company.
But I think overall, I’m very optimistic about people using technology. I started working on this because I like the history of art, and if you look at the history of art, art and technology are intertwined all the time. Every time there’s a breakthrough in technology, there’s a breakthrough in art, and that helps understand the world better. It helps artists communicate things they never could communicate before. That’s great. Would we fight against artists being able to do things they couldn’t do before, to express and tell us things about the world that we never thought of before? Of course not. I think overall I’m an optimist and I think if you’re an optimist, you can think about the world slightly different, instead of just thinking about all the things that can go wrong.
SAFIAN: So what’s at stake for Runway right now?
VALENZUELA: What’s at stake? A lot. I mean, we’re just getting started. I know. It’s the realization that these tools and these models are going to become way more useful and powerful to many than we ever thought.
SAFIAN: The tech is changing so fast and has already changed so fast and it can already do so much stuff. And yet at the same time, as you say, it’s early.
VALENZUELA: Oh, it’s so early. It’s so early. Getting a state of embracing uncertainty, which I know is hard because humans want predictability. Change is hard, you’re afraid of it. It’s always easier to be more predictable about things. But I think these are very unpredictable times for the good and the bad. And I think the best state of mind is to understand that yeah, change is the only constant these days.
SAFIAN: Well, Cris, this has been great. Thank you so much for doing it.
VALENZUELA: Of course. Thank you for having me. It was a fun chat.
SAFIAN: I do love the creativity coming out of new AI video tools like Runway, but I also want to hark back to the business creativity that AI is sparking and requiring. As Cris said, if you’re thinking about a product roadmap that’s a year long, you’re not going to make it. That rate of change may apply more to start-ups and AI developers, but we all need to adjust our speed to meet the moment. Are the days of a true two year or five year roadmap gone? I don’t know, but one thing’s for sure. We can’t be so shackled to a set vision of the future that we neglect the evolving realities of today. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.