Runway (company)

Last updated
Runway AI, Inc.
Company type Private
Industry Artificial intelligence, machine learning, software development
Founded2018;6 years ago (2018)
Headquarters
Manhattan, New York City
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
  • Cristóbal Valenzuela (CEO)
  • Anastasis Germanidis (CTO)
  • Alejandro Matamala (CDO)
ProductsGen-1, Gen-2, Gen-3 Alpha
Number of employees
86
Website runwayml.com

Runway AI, Inc. (also known as Runway and RunwayML) is an American company headquartered in New York City that specializes in generative artificial intelligence research and technologies. [1] The company is primarily focused on creating products and models for generating videos, images, and various multimedia content. It is most notable for developing the commercial text-to-video and video generative AI models Gen-1, Gen-2 [2] [3] and Gen-3 Alpha. [1]

Contents

Runway's tools and AI models have been utilized in films such as Everything Everywhere All At Once, [4] in music videos for artists including A$AP Rocky, [5] Kanye West, [6] Brockhampton, and The Dandy Warhols, [7] and in editing television shows like The Late Show [8] and Top Gear. [9]

History

The company was founded in 2018 by the Chileans Cristóbal Valenzuela, [10] Alejandro Matamala, and the Greek Anastasis Germanidis after they met at New York University Tisch School of the Arts ITP. [11] The company raised US$2 million in 2018 to build a platform to deploy machine learning models at scale inside multimedia applications.

In December 2020, Runway raised US$8.5 million [12] in a Series A funding round.

On December, 2021, the company raised US$35 million in a Series B funding round. [13]

In August 2022, the company co-released an improved version of their Latent Diffusion model with the CompVis Group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a compute donation by Stability AI. [14] [15]

On December 21, 2022 Runway raised U$50 million [16] in a Series C round. Followed by a $141 million Series C extension round in June 2023 at a $1.5 billion valuation [17] [18] from Google, Nvidia, and Salesforce [19] to build foundational multimodal AI models for content generation to be used in films and video production. [20] [21]

In February 2023 Runway released Gen-1 and Gen-2 the first commercial and publicly available foundational video-to-video and text-to-video generation model [22] [23] [24] accessible via a simple web interface.

In June 2023 Runway was selected as one of the 100 Most Influential Companies in the world by TIME magazine. [25]

Services and technologies

Runway is focused on generative AI for video, media, and art. The company focuses on developing proprietary foundational model technology that professionals in filmmaking, post-production, advertising, editing, and visual effects can utilize. Additionally, Runway offers an iOS app aimed at consumers [26]

The Runway product is accessible via a web platform and through an API as a managed service.

Gen-1

Gen-1 is a video-to-video generative AI system that synthesize new videos by applying the composition and style of an image or text prompt to the structure of a source video. The model was released in February 2023. The Gen-1 model was trained and developed by Runway based on the original paper Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models from Runway Research. [27] Gen-1 is an example of Generative artificial intelligence for video creation.

Gen-2

Gen-2 is a multimodal AI system that can generate novel videos with text, images or video clips. The model is a continuation of Gen-1 and includes a modality to generate video conditioned to text. Gen-2 is one of the first commercially available text-to-video models. [28] [29] [30] [31]

Gen-3 Alpha

Gen-3 Alpha is the first of an upcoming series of models trained by Runway on a new infrastructure built for large-scale multimodal training. It is a major improvement in fidelity, consistency, and motion over Gen-2, and a step towards building General World Models. [2]

Training data for Gen-3 has been sourced from thousands of YouTube videos and potentially pirated films. A former Runway employee alleged to 404 Media that a company-wide effort was to compile videos into spreadsheets, which was then downloaded using youtube-dl through proxy servers to avoid being blocked by YouTube. In tests, 404 Media discovered that names of YouTubers would generate videos in their respective styles. [32]

AI Film Festival

Runway hosts an annual AI Film Festival [33] in Los Angeles and New York City. [34] [35]

Related Research Articles

Music and artificial intelligence (AI) is the development of music software programs which use AI to generate music. As with applications in other fields, AI in music also simulates mental tasks. A prominent feature is the capability of an AI algorithm to learn based on past data, such as in computer accompaniment technology, wherein the AI is capable of listening to a human performer and performing accompaniment. Artificial intelligence also drives interactive composition technology, wherein a computer composes music in response to a live performance. There are other AI applications in music that cover not only music composition, production, and performance but also how music is marketed and consumed. Several music player programs have also been developed to use voice recognition and natural language processing technology for music voice control. Current research includes the application of AI in music composition, performance, theory and digital sound processing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brainly</span> Educational technology company

Brainly is an education company based in Kraków, Poland, with headquarters in New York City. It is an AI-powered homework help platform targeting students and parents. As of November 2020, Brainly reported having 15 million daily active users, making it the world's most popular education app. In 2024, FlexOS reported Brainly as the #1 Generative AI Tool in the education category and the #6 Generative AI Tool overall. Also in 2024, Andreessen Horowitz reported Brainly as #6 in the Top 50 Gen AI Mobile Apps by monthly active users.

Multimodal learning, in the context of machine learning, is a type of deep learning using multiple modalities of data, such as text, audio, or images.

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its mission is to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence, which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As a leading organization in the ongoing AI boom, OpenAI is known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Artificial intelligence art</span> Machine application of knowledge of human aesthetic expressions

Artificial intelligence art is visual artwork created through the use of an artificial intelligence (AI) program.

Cristóbal Valenzuela is a Chilean-born technologist, software developer, and CEO of Runway. In 2018, Valenzuela co-founded the AI research company Runway in New York City with Anastasis Germanidis and Alejandro Matamala.

You.com is an AI assistant that began as a personalization-focused search engine. While still offering web search capabilities, You.com has evolved to prioritize a chat-first AI assistant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stable Diffusion</span> Image-generating machine learning model

Stable Diffusion is a deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022 based on diffusion techniques. The generative artificial intelligence technology is the premier product of Stability AI and is considered to be a part of the ongoing artificial intelligence boom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Text-to-image model</span> Machine learning model

A text-to-image model is a machine learning model which takes an input natural language description and produces an image matching that description.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emad Mostaque</span> Bangladeshi-British businessperson and former hedge fund manager

Mohammad Emad Mostaque is a British-Bangladeshi business executive, mathematician, and former hedge fund manager. He is the founder and was CEO of Stability AI until 23 March 2024, one of the companies behind Stable Diffusion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Text-to-video model</span> Machine learning model

A text-to-video model is a machine learning model that takes a natural language description as input and produces a video relevant to the input text. Recent advancements in generating high-quality, text-conditioned videos have largely been driven by the development of video diffusion models.

ElevenLabs is a software company that specializes in developing natural-sounding speech synthesis software using deep learning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Generative artificial intelligence</span> AI system capable of generating content in response to prompts

Generative artificial intelligence is artificial intelligence capable of generating text, images, videos, or other data using generative models, often in response to prompts. Generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data and then generate new data that has similar characteristics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AI boom</span> Ongoing period of rapid progress in artificial intelligence

The AI boom, or AI spring, is an ongoing period of rapid progress in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) that started in the late 2010s before gaining global prominence by 2022. Known examples include protein folding prediction led by Google DeepMind and generative AI led by OpenAI.

In the 2020s, the rapid advancement of deep learning-based generative artificial intelligence models are raising questions about whether copyright infringement occurs when the generative AI is trained or used. This includes text-to-image models such as Stable Diffusion and large language models such as ChatGPT. As of 2023, there are several pending U.S. lawsuits challenging the use of copyrighted data to train AI models, with defendants arguing that this falls under fair use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adobe Firefly</span> Image-generating machine learning model

Adobe Firefly is a generative machine learning model included as part of Adobe Creative Cloud. It is currently being tested in an open beta phase.

Aleph Alpha is a German artificial intelligence (AI) startup company founded by professionals with experience as employees of Apple, SAP and Deloitte, based in Heidelberg. Aleph Alpha attempts to provide a full-stack sovereign technology stack for generative AI, independent from US companies and comply with European data protection regulations and the AI Act. It built one of the most powerful AI clusters inside its own data centre and develops large language models (LLM), which try to provide transparency of its sources used for the results generated and are intended for enterprises and governmental agencies only. Training of its model has been done in five European languages.

Suno AI, or simply Suno, is a generative artificial intelligence music creation program designed to generate realistic songs that combine vocals and instrumentation, or are purely instrumental. Suno has been widely available since December 20, 2023, after the launch of a web application and a partnership with Microsoft, which included Suno as a plugin in Microsoft Copilot.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sora (text-to-video model)</span> Text-to-video model by OpenAI

Sora is an upcoming generative artificial intelligence model developed by OpenAI, that specializes in text-to-video generation. The model generates short video clips corresponding to prompts from users. Sora can also extend existing short videos. As of July 2024 it is unreleased and not yet available to the public.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stability AI</span>

Stability AI is an artificial intelligence company, best known for it's text-to-image model Stable Diffusion.

References

  1. 1 2 Metz, Cade (2023-04-04). "Instant Videos Could Represent the Next Leap in A.I. Technology". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  2. 1 2 "Generative AI's Next Frontier Is Video". Bloomberg.com. 2023-03-20. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  3. ↑ Vincent, James (2023-03-20). "Text-to-video AI inches closer as startup Runway announces new model". The Verge. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  4. ↑ "How director and editor Evan Halleck uses Runway for films, music videos, and commercials". Runway. Retrieved 2024-03-01.
  5. ↑ "Distorting Reality with Dan Streit". Runway. Retrieved 2024-03-01.
  6. ↑ Cowen, Trace William. "Kanye West Shares Unsettling Video for "Vultures (Havoc Version)" Ahead of Ty Dolla Sign Collab Album Release". Complex. Retrieved 2024-03-01.
  7. ↑ The Dandy Warhols - “I’d Like To Help You With Your Problem (feat. Slash)” - Official Music Video , retrieved 2024-03-01
  8. ↑ "How Runway took The Late Show edits from five hours to five minutes". Runway. Retrieved 2024-03-01.
  9. ↑ "How Drew Emery uses Runway to edit content for Top Gear America & Cooper's Bar". Runway. Retrieved 2024-03-01.
  10. ↑ "TIME100 AI 2023: Cristóbal Valenzuela". Time. 2023-09-07. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  11. ↑ Black, Julia. "'Not Everyone Is Trying to Build God': Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela Tries to Dampen the Doomerism". The Information. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  12. ↑ "RunwayML raises $8.5 million for its AI-powered media creation tools". VentureBeat. 2020-12-16. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  13. ↑ "Runway raises $35M Series B | Runway Blog". Runway. Retrieved 2023-11-07.
  14. ↑ Cai, Kenrick. "The AI Founder Taking Credit For Stable Diffusion's Success Has A History Of Exaggeration". Forbes. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  15. ↑ "The original startup behind Stable Diffusion has launched a generative AI for video". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  16. ↑ Cai, Kenrick. "Runway Raises $50 Million At $500 Million Valuation As Generative AI Craze Continues". Forbes. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  17. ↑ "AI Video Startup Runway Raises $141 Million From Google, Nvidia". Bloomberg.com. 2023-06-29. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  18. ↑ Wiggers, Kyle (2023-06-29). "Runway, a startup building generative AI for content creators, raises $141M". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  19. ↑ "Google Invests in AI Startup Runway to Wrest Cloud Business From AWS". The Information. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  20. ↑ Black, Julia. "'Not Everyone Is Trying to Build God': Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela Tries to Dampen the Doomerism". The Information. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  21. ↑ "Featured interview: Runway AI CEO Chris Valenzuela - First Move with Julia Chatterley - Podcast on CNN Audio". CNN. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  22. ↑ Metz, Cade (2023-04-04). "Instant Videos Could Represent the Next Leap in A.I. Technology". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  23. ↑ "Generative AI's Next Frontier Is Video". Bloomberg.com. 2023-03-20. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  24. ↑ Vincent, James (2023-03-20). "Text-to-video AI inches closer as startup Runway announces new model". The Verge. Retrieved 2023-09-15.
  25. ↑ "TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2023: Runway". Time. 2023-06-21. Retrieved 2023-09-20.
  26. ↑ Vincent, James (2023-04-24). "Create generative AI video-to-video right from your phone with Runway's iOS app". The Verge. Retrieved 2024-03-01.
  27. ↑ "Gen-1 by Runway". Runway. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  28. ↑ "Text to Video Generative AI Is Finally Here and It's Weird as Hell". Gizmodo. 2023-03-22. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  29. ↑ Wiggers, Kyle (2023-06-09). "Runway's Gen-2 shows the limitations of today's text-to-video tech". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  30. ↑ Avram Piltch (2023-06-08). "Runway's Powerful Gen-2 Text-to-Video Tool Now Available to Everyone for Free". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  31. ↑ Vincent, James (2023-03-20). "Text-to-video AI inches closer as startup Runway announces new model". The Verge. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  32. ↑ Cole, Samantha (July 25, 2024). "AI Video Generator Runway Trained on Thousands of YouTube Videos Without Permission". 404 Media . Retrieved July 25, 2024.
  33. ↑ "Runway AI Film Festival". Runway. Retrieved 2023-11-18.
  34. ↑ Melendez, Steven. "A new film festival will only show movies made using AI".
  35. ↑ Kokalitcheva, Kia. "1 big movie thing: an AI-generated film festival".
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.