Runway, a startup building generative AI for content creators, raises $141M

The versatility of Runway AI is evident in the broad range of industries that have already started adopting the tool. Let’s take a closer look at some real-world examples of how Runway AI is being used in different fields. Individual generations with Gen-2 are currently limited to 4 seconds for all plans​. We Yakov Livshits also had our first all-team offsite dinner here, so it’s a special place for our team. This new funding will also help us invest further in R&D, and double down on hiring. We have an incredibly high bar for new hires, so this backing will help us continue to target the best talent the market has to offer.

The company is currently hiring across engineering, research and go-to-market teams. Once your model is trained, you can explore it and instantly generate 100 free HD images that are provided upfront. To create, train, and deploy enterprise-scale AI models requires immense computing power, and our work with AWS has helped us deliver products that millions of people can use. But experts believe they can iron out the flaws as they train their systems on more and more data. They believe the technology will ultimately make creating a video as easy as writing a sentence.

The company has labeled this approach “video to video” and promises that it’s the next step forward in generative AI. The AI currently has five different modes, including “stylization,” “storyboard,” “mask,” “render,” and “customization,” each offering a unique way to manipulate and enhance source videos. The CEO of Runway, Cristóbal Valenzuela, states that Gen-1 is one of the first models developed with video makers in mind and has already been used in several feature films. He also predicts that in the near future, most of the content we see online will be generated by AI.

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The power of tools like Runway paired with the cloud make it possible for filmmakers and other creatives to save significant amounts of time and money as they bring their ideas to life. Technologies, Runway’s system learns by analyzing digital data — in this case, photos, videos and captions describing what those images contain. By training this kind of technology on increasingly large amounts of data, researchers are confident they can rapidly improve and expand its skills. Soon, experts believe, they will generate professional-looking mini-movies, complete with music and dialogue. Actually, after quick research we found out, Runway has been developing AI-powered video-editing software since 2018.

Within 24 hours, we’ll review your request and connect you to your existing profile for full editing. This is No Film School, of course we’ve written about this concept many times before. Let’s look at this new update and explore how it looks, plus go over some Yakov Livshits insights into what this could mean for the future of AI for video as it continues to evolve. Artificial intelligence continues to grow and is now arguably the most talked about invention today, especially since OpenAI launched its ChatGPT AI language model.

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In the film industry, Runway AI’s text-to-video capabilities have been utilized to create stunning visual effects and animations. With just a few lines of text, filmmakers can create lifelike characters, creatures, and environments that interact seamlessly with live-action footage. The ability to create complex animations quickly and efficiently can save filmmakers both time and money, while also opening up new creative possibilities. In the fashion industry, Runway AI has been used to generate realistic images of clothing on models without the need for expensive photoshoots. By inputting a few simple parameters, such as the size and colour of the garment, Runway AI can produce high-quality images that are indistinguishable from those taken during an actual photoshoot. One of Runway’s primary areas of focus is the exploration of multi-modal AI systems.

• But to Runway’s credit, Gen-2 — the follow-up to Runway’s Gen-1 model launched in February — is one of the first commercially available text-to-video models.
• “Stable Diffusion didn’t exist until we invented it,” Valenzuela said in November.
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• According to The Information, Google invested in Runway at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation.
• The ChatGPT developer earlier raised a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019.

When using generative AI, it’s crucial to provide clear context and input to achieve the desired outcome. Knowing where you want to go and having a clear vision in mind is key to successful collaboration between humans and AI. It revolves around a man living in a closed, dark apartment, isolated from the world. One day, as sunlight streams through the window and caresses his face, he decides to step out of his comfort zone and discover the beauty of the outside world. On video automation and synthetic media, reduces the costs of creating visual media across creative industries. Considering their rise to the forefront of an industry with little (if any) attention on the people behind it, you might ask “Who is the founder of RunwayML?

Runway began with a mission to build AI for creatives

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

AI-driven tools are absolutely the future of design, allowing artists to express themselves in new and previously unimaginable ways. Tools and technological advancements throughout history have had an impact on design. If we go back to the mid-1800s, there’s a great example of this in the invention of the paint tube, which gave paint a longer shelf life and could be repeatedly opened and closed for painting outdoors. This ultimately led to the impressionist movement for modern painting—it’s no different from the massive creative shift we’re experiencing now in content creation.

In March, VentureBeat spoke to Runway CEO and cofounder Cristóbal Valenzuela. He discussed the gated launch of Runway’s Gen-2 tool, which is now generally available, and the company’s founding four years ago with a mission to build AI tools specifically for artists and creatives. According to Runway’s paper, Gen-1 is a combination of generative adversarial networks and variational autoencoders, which are trained on large video datasets.

Runway develops cutting edge video generation AI models.

This is how the first iteration of our video generation model, Gen-1, works. „Our scalable AI infrastructure has become the foundation for some of the most important and innovative generative AI startups in the world,“ said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. The startup that co-created Stable Diffusion, Runway, has broken new ground in the world of generative AI for video with their latest venture, Gen-1. Runway’s new generative AI can create new videos from existing ones with either a text prompt or a reference image. For Runway, this isn’t their first launch into AI-powered video editing software. The startup has been working on developing new video-focused software since 2018.

Utilizing the power of machine learning, the AI system interprets your input and constructs a unique video that aligns with your prompts. This innovative process takes creativity and convenience to a whole new level. More broadly, generative AI tools work by generating new data using patterns learned in existing data. To generate new things—like images, video, or text—you can use different input mechanisms. For example, natural language has become one of the easiest ways to control image generation algorithms, but other input systems like video are also possible.

While the first model took existing video and made changes or additions to it, the new model goes further, enabling users to input a photo or just text and get a video for the output. The company was founded in 2018 by the Chileans Cristóbal Valenzuela[5], Alejandro Matamala, and the Greek Anastasis Germanidis after they met at New York University Tisch School of the Arts ITP. The company raised US$2 million in 2018 to build a platform to deploy machine learning models at scale inside multimedia applications. Its ability to generate high-quality images, videos, and animations quickly and efficiently has already had a significant impact on various industries. As with any technology, there are challenges and concerns surrounding its use, but with responsible and ethical practices, AI can revolutionize the creative process. In an increasingly digital world, creating engaging video content is crucial but often challenging and time-consuming.

This generative AI system is a product of Runway’s mission to usher in a new era of human creativity by building multimodal AI systems. It’s a part of Runway’s AI Magic Tools, which also include Gen-1, Text to Image, Image to Image, Infinite Image, Video Inpainting, Frame Interpolation, and Custom AI Training. It is an AI model designed to generate videos from text prompts or an existing image. The model follows the release of Runway’s Gen-1, and it is one of the first commercially available text-to-video models​.

Runway Research is at the forefront of these developments and is dedicated to ensuring the future of creativity is accessible, controllable and empowering for all. With Gen-1, Runway is launching Video to Video, a form of generative AI that uses words and images to generate new videos out of existing ones. This means applying Runway algorithms to your own dataset of images (training data) and video to substantially influence the results you consistently produce. In February of 2023 Runway released Gen-1 the first commercial and publicly available foundational video-to-video and text-to-video generation model[8][9][10] accessible via a simple web interface.