Towards Universal Simulation agermanidis.com/writings/uni…

Introducing Inside View. A new series exploring the impact of AI, from the people who are shaping it. Episode one features Anthony Maggio, Chief Product Officer at Runway, discussing what the electrification of factories teaches us about the adoption of AI.

New pod drop!! @RunwayML just turned 8 years and added $100M+ in ARR last quarter alone. I met Anastasis Germanidis (@agermanidis), co-CEO of Runway, who went from art school to building one of the most important video and world models of our generation. We talk about: - The Nietzsche-inspired game he tried to build at 15 - “We accidentally created one of the best models for robotics” - 30 magic tools in 30 days - Sora launch: a 2-hour existential crisis → a better model in 3 months - Proof of work > credentials - Running “a perfect simulation” of his co-CEO Cristóbal (@c_valenzuelab) - “I’m always becoming someone else” and so much more! Timestamps (00:00) Trailer (01:21) Anastasis Germanidis, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Runway (02:27) Accidentally building one of the best robotics models (07:18) How video models train robots and self-driving cars (10:47) What a world model actually is (16:19) Why folding clothes is still unsolved for AI (17:37) Why AGI can never be reached (22:03) A game built on Nietzsche's eternal recurrence (30:35) Starting an AI company from art school (39:47) Why staying in stealth is counterproductive (42:03) 30 magic tools in 30 days (55:55) Sora's launch and an hour of existential crisis (57:02) Racing to beat Sora in three months (1:01:56) Solaris and software generated in real time (1:05:15) Why AI labs pay for fake versions of Amazon (1:09:52) Why Sora struggled as a consumer app (1:16:30) Hiring on proof of work (1:19:44) Becoming co-CEO with Cristóbal Valenzuela (@c_valenzuelab) (1:30:56) What he's still becoming (1:32:52) Outro

Runway turned eight years old this week. We started at a time when generative models were a research curiosity, and had to figure out how to run an AI company from first principles. Growing this organization has been one of the biggest joys of my life. Below is a short note that I sent the team: Thank you for the kind words, everyone. The reality is, as convenient as it might be to portray otherwise, the Runway of today looks nothing like the Runway of 2018. And that's by design. We didn't know we'd be focusing on video, let alone pretraining video models at scale, let alone pursuing world models. It's a convention to rewrite the origin story to fit the present. But this company is all about breaking conventions, so let's do away with that one too, shall we? So then, what is Runway about? I think Runway is a story about betting on people. By far the most gratifying moments of my time here have been watching people get an opportunity and then prove themselves far beyond what anyone expected. The person with zero publications who became one of the most important researchers in the community. The person who barely spoke in meetings and became one of the best managers in the company. You know who you are. And it's the three of us too: Alejandro, Cris, and me. Three people from an art school with zero connections should not have built a company that made it this far. It wasn't supposed to happen. It did because we got lucky with the people we brought on. I desperately want the story and legacy of this company to be about how good people win. In the world we live in, the default is that the loudest people win, no matter how wrong they are. We've beaten many loud-but-wrong competitors, but we can't take that for granted. The odds favor the loud over the right, because loudness is noticed immediately and being right takes time to be noticed. So when you know you are right, please be louder than you think you should be, even when it feels uncomfortable. The world will be better for it. And let's all make the ninth year of Runway the loudest one yet.

Introducing Runway App Studio. Build the creative app you wish existed, just by describing it. It generates images, video and audio with Runway’s models and your Brand Kits, ready for you or your whole team. No code required. See examples in the thread below.

From a narrow simulator of pixels to a universal simulator of reality. This essay is the result of multiple conversations with Packy about Runway’s long-time research thesis on world models. It's one of the most extensive overviews of our work yet, going over the applications of world models in media, robotics, interfaces, and science.

Runway and 60 Minutes: a behind-the-scenes look at how we made the intro for the new episode with Jon Wertheim.

Researchers at Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital found that transplanted hearts shift toward the biological age of their recipients. Old hearts get younger in young bodies, and young hearts get older in older ones. Which is nuts. Today, we're launching a partnership with our friends @runwayml to, among other things, bring one of the stories from each week's Dose to life in video. I'm not great at it yet, but not bad for a few prompts! And I'm excited to get better. I have zero talent in film/video, but I can write, which now means that I can make movies. Age of miracles.

Using AI “is not a proxy for your productivity or you doing a good job at work,” @runwayml COO Michelle Kwon tells #FortuneAIQSummit. bit.ly/4rFKURL

Very excited about the possibilities powered by interface world models. Continuum is an early research application exploring an operating system built around interactive video. A stepping stone toward a future where every interface is video generated in real time.

It's really cool to see our robot packing items it hadn't observed in the training data, demonstrating zero-shot learning at our AI Summit.

great to hear from @KatieLewisMIT @jimei_yang and @agermanidis at our @runwayml summit research panel. some takeaways if you're a builder thinking about what this unlocks for products + interfaces 🧵

We are using Runway Ads internally, we were able to 10X our ads with even cheaper cost per conversion(40% cheaper) and scale up the spend vs return efficiently:

Announcing our first open-weights world-action model, Praxis-1. It turns out that, unsurprisingly, you can get predictably better robotics policy performance by scaling third-person video. It’s been fun to see the different tasks the model can solve zero-shot around our office. We’re already working with Noble Machines, Standard Bots, and Ultra, to deploy Praxis-1 on their embodiments, and are excited to get it to the hands of more partners soon.

This is a 100% true story. Retold with 100% AI. For everyone I've told it to before, I hope it lives up to whatever madness you had playing in your head.

made a self-animating drawing app real-time video models feel like magic

We believe instant generation is where video models are headed. Last week, we released Solaris and GWM Worlds 2, and detailed our approach to agent training in digital and physical worlds. Today, we’re sharing a broader look at our research efforts in real-time video generation. Read more at the link below. runway.com/news/research/tow…

We crossed $200M ARR last week, doubling from $100M in April. Runway is the world model company. We power the daily work of more than 60 million creators and 95% of the Fortune 100. From award-winning films and ad campaigns to real-time media applications to generalist robotics. Our largest customers are increasingly licensing our frontier models directly. As we expand our research in robotics, the wonderful team from Kinetix, a Paris-based research lab, is joining Runway to help drive our efforts there. Proud of the team for getting us here. Back to building the universal world simulator.

At the limit, world models will become the RL environments for everything. Excited to announce GWM Worlds 2, the first world model with a general action space, merging navigation, manipulation and human interaction in one model. We're already using it to evaluate vision-language models on real-world tasks. We're also working with game developers to prototype new kinds of interactive experiences, powered by a world-prompting format that lets you schedule player actions, dialogue, SFX and world events.

Runway Co-Founder & Co-CEO @agermanidis breaks down Solaris, an interface world model that generates interactive applications pixel by pixel: "Solaris is what we call an interface world model." "It's an interactive video model that essentially renders an interface for you." "The difference is that it's all generated pixel by pixel by a video model." "Unlike traditional interfaces where you write some code, you write some HTML or CSS, and then that renders pixels, you're now rendering pixels directly." "By doing that you get a ton more flexibility." "You can kind of leverage everything that the video model can do and create any kind of application on top of it."

Interfaces that are generated, not coded. Solaris is our first step toward our vision of end-to-end neural software, where user interfaces are streamed directly onto your screen by a real-time video model, without any intermediate code or HTML/CSS. Today we're releasing a technical report and opening it up for limited testing by the community. Amazing work by the team, combining the best of our research in general world models with Runway's HCI spirit.