Runway CEO Cristobal Valenzuela is simulating the world

23:23And I think one of the things that I think investors and I would say the public is always trying to find is what's the label for this? How do you call it? My belief is we're not sure how to call it yet because we're living through the thing right now. So it's hard to find a name for it. Photography didn't have a name until 20 years of experimentation happened and we come up with this idea of photography. I think we'll eventually collectively figure out a name. We're calling it world models. These are like systems that can, that's like they're from a research perspective, but I would say from a medium perspective, we'll collectively have to figure out how to label this.

24:00Chris, I believe it's called slop. Come on now. Slop, well, I think it's not. Look, I think like film and photography were slop like 150 years ago. People made fun of it because it wasn't, I think the mistake was to make painters judge photography. And painters are like, look, this daguerreotype that you just showed me, it's really bad. I can paint this masterpiece, which is fair. But those are not equal comparisons of sorts. And I think we're now doing kind of this thing where someone is like, look, I'm a filmmaker. I've done all this thing and you're making this. And I think you're right, but also you're missing the point, which is like, these are not equal things.

24:39So it kind of takes love actually as a great compliment. It means that we're heading to something totally different.

24:44Ellis:The labeling conversation is so interesting to me. And I am honestly a little triggered by the camera reframe because that's what we tried to do at Snapchat for many years. And I think at the end of the day, even when I talk to clients today, I'm like, well, the simplest answer is just to use the language of what your customer wants. and how are you talking about it with your customers these days, especially the studios? Do they think of this as a measure to kind of cut costs and make things more efficient? Or are they thinking about the possibilities that maybe only AI could afford, maybe in terms of like surprising results that maybe the artist wouldn't have even expected?

25:27Ellis:How do you talk about it with them? What do they say that they want? I think sometimes they don't really know what they want, to be honest. And I think part of it is there's a gap in AI literacy that needs to be closed. I would argue that one of the biggest bottlenecks in AI these days is how people fully understand how these things work. And you can see this in enterprise adoption and people using AI. The models can do very sufficient, really good economic work. The bottleneck is not the models. is like the people within specific companies or within teams that know how to do it and how to use them and have to leverage them.

26:02And understanding that the way you've done things in the past might not necessarily adjust well. And so a lot of what we do is we, for companies that we work like really closely with, we have teams of people that go and work with you and they see it and like explain to you kind of the different things that these models do and how they work and how they operate that are not based on how you've done things in the past. And that's kind of the beauty of it. It's kind of the mental models, the human mental models are the ones that we need to update these days and not the models themselves. We get so many people who ask us about things they want to see in Runway and Runway can already do those things for like six to eight, you know?

26:42And so I think that deployment of people within enterprises and companies is going to help just clients and folks figure out much better how to get the most value out of it. Isn't that called the Forward Deployed Engineer? Isn't that the new buzzword in the labs? Yeah.

27:02Ellis:Alex has been spending too much time in San Francisco. Yeah. I can tell. Way too much time. It's funny. We started, so we hired our first, we called them Forward Deployed Artists like three years ago. And it became like a, we didn't have a name for it. So we called them, we called them, we built them Workflow Architects. And it was basically like come up and like help us like build this inside specific partners. And I think, yeah, now it's becoming some sort of like a job and a role of its own, which is, I think, knitted. I think, again, we sometimes forget that even for like the internet, people have to be taught how to use it, you know?

27:36It's like national campaigns around how to send an email. And I think it's new. You have to like figure out how it all works. And I think we're transitioning through some of that same thing kind of right now. Something you all did really recently that I thought was smart on that note was the apps concept. Is that what it's called? Runway apps? Yeah, correct. So basically, because when you look at Runway, it's a complex tool. I would not know how to use it. I don't edit video. But I would imagine even if you've come up with Premiere or Final Cut or whatever, you look at Runway, it's probably pretty foreign, a lot of the concepts.

28:10Talk about that apps launch and why you did that. Is it for the reason you're saying, which is just people have a hard time understanding what they can even do with this? Yeah, so you're absolutely right. Right. Apps is, so you can think about like raw models as like an intermittent layer. Like you're obstructing and you're building some sort of interface to tap into this system that can join anything. And the most convenient way is you use prompts or images or different things. But then for a lot of newcomers, for brands, for designers, for agencies, there's specific things they have in mind they want to make.

28:42And sometimes learning the structure of the prompts and how to best get the outputs is complex. And so we build an abstraction system on top, which is mostly focused on what do you want, right? What is it that you want? It's a customer, it's a user. If I'm a brand designer, if I'm working on, I don't know, a concept video or I'm making some visual effects shots, I know exactly the thing I want. And so you have an app for that. And you click on the app and the app basically tells you what you need to input, like references or images. And it all cooks behind the scenes and it shows you the output.

29:13and it's one of her best and like most fastest growing products that we've released recently. You tweeted one where the app changed the time of day, like it changed the lighting and that was wild to me. You called it like a time machine. It's, yeah, it's like those things have been there but now figuring out how to best present them to people, it's like a UI and obstruction challenge of like, again, like think about that. Like you're translating like a specific like shot, a real scene of like day into night. Like outside of AI, we're talking about if you want to do that, we're talking about weeks of work and thousands of dollars from like a professional studio to just get to somehow similar results.

30:00Now you can do it in like 10, literally 12. And usually day to night looks like absolute shit.

30:06Ellis:Yeah, it looks like when studios try to do it traditionally. Yeah, I mean, probably. because it's hard to do. It's a very hard task. And for the model to do it, for Runway to do it in like 12 seconds feels like incredibly powerful. But I don't think people realize that there's these powerful systems and powerful machines that you can do this stuff. And so again, I have to just go and show you. I have to go and explain to you how it works. I think part of what I would say has prevented some of that like more mainstream like adoption is the curse of the prompt. It's what I call it, where prompts have taken over AI.

30:46You know, if you think about AI as an industry, it's like a whole economy of certs. There's all different sort of obligations. But I would say still the biggest narrative is I see around is people think of AI as just a prompt. It's a prompt. You're typing something and you get something out. It's way more than that. You can do way more sophisticated stuff. And so you need to like, again, hopefully explain and tell people how it all works.

31:07Ellis:I'm curious, were you excited about this app's idea before it happened? Because I feel like a lot of founders, especially when they're making a tool that could ostensibly use for anything, they see putting those frames or use cases or templates in the UI as limiting in some way. And they say, oh, well, if we only say we could do a handful of things, then how are people going to know that they can use it for anything? And it's a debate you often see. Yeah, I think you're right. It depends on exactly what you're focusing on. So we're not focusing on apps alone. You have different levels of complexity.

31:43We have a thing called workflows. So workflows is for much more advanced users. I tweeted a recent kind of short film someone made just with this workflow interface. It's a node-based graph, a kind of system for creating really complex things. And so really the models and runways and idea is that you can generalize the models to basically tackle any single, hopefully, problem you want to solve. Some of them are easier. Some of them are a bit more complex. But you can lean and probably solve for all of them if you want. So apps is, I would say, one offering. it's not they offering that we're like putting out there so i didn't get to go to the most recent one but last year i went to the festival you guys had in la and it was a really interesting experience seeing all the films i then i went i think i went to one the year before a couple years before how many years have you been doing those now actually so we've been hosting our film festival for three years now three years okay so i went to the first one and the second one and i missed this so you went to the first one that's like uh i went to the first one yeah Well, you and I got coffee in LA, I think around that time.

32:47And it was, you all were, you all were just a baby, not even a unicorn at that point. But it was really amazing to see the progress from even just, you know, year one to year two, right? It was pretty dramatic. I assume it was even more dramatic this year, but I got to be honest, like when I was there, I was, I was marveling at that, but I was also kind of, I left feeling like a little empty, you know like when you leave one battle after another which i've now seen in theaters three times like you're very alive right it's an amazing film it's very human uh and i missed that in the shorts even though they were very creative they looked awesome the stories were you know whatever shorts are can be rough on that but there were good stories but but but i i man i just i left a little empty.

33:37Do you hear that from people still when they see a bunch of AI content like that? I think at the end it's all about the story. Like, I don't think people watch things because of how they were made. Like, one battle after the other is just great storytelling. It's one of the greatest filmmakers, like, we've ever seen alive, like, makes one of the biggest films he's done. The reason you watch it's just because it's a good story. It's good acting. It's just great script. I think that doesn't really change the nature of, like, whatever you use to make it. If you use AI, if you use cameras, if you use whatever technique.

34:11I think three years ago when we started the festival, we wanted to basically provide a venue and a space for people that were at different tier of new technologies to expose themselves to this form and sharing what they've made. I would say the transition from the last three years has been from the technical obsession of how things can work and how you can experiment and get to new aesthetics and you like to storytelling. Like the winners of this year's festival, they won because of the story. Like the point was at a point you kind of forget that your scene is generated. That is like the last frontier is you forget you're seeing something that was made with AI.

34:53The winner of this year's festival is now producing like a big film and he wasn't even a filmmaker. He was a musician who had this idea around like a story he wanted to tell. He worked on it for like a year. He won. It was the like favorite of everyone who was in the festival. And now he wrote a project. He's actually making like new stuff like with actual production budget behind it. I think for to grab that attention and to make sure like that works, you have to have a story behind. And I think that that doesn't change regardless of like what you're using, you know?

35:31Ellis:Is it fair for Alex to compare AI video content to Paul Thomas Anderson? Well, I think that's like, again, if you think about it as a new medium, it's like you're comparing like the Lumiere brothers to like Rembrandt, you know, like they're different things. Like, of course, they're great painters, but this is different. Of course, like PTA is like the greatest, one of the greatest filmmakers alive, but this is like a new thing that's just, it's like a year and a half old. So it's, I think it's not probably fully fair because they're different things. But I mean, at the end of the day, for viewers, it might be just like the same.

36:06But I'm convinced that models will get better. Quality will get better. The stuff that's coming out right now, it's moving away from the technical novelty and into like story-tory, real territory, which is the most interesting one for me.

36:19Ellis:I'm in the mood to make fun of Alex today. So I'm going to continue with this line of thought and impression. So I just saw one battle after the other like three times. And like everything online is so slop. I've got a mustache now. I saw it at the Vista Theater. okay i saw it in vista vision flex i think chris is right though i mean there's a pretty big difference between using a new tool to like create an impressive explosion if you will or to execute your authorial intent with some potentially unexpected results that might delight you like I think people can see that. And I mean, this is how I felt at the OpenAI Sora event I went to a year or so ago, Brain Dead.

37:05Ellis:Everything felt very auteur driven in terms of the experimental filmmaking and the storytelling. And it is definitely a different aesthetic, I feel like, that you feel with AI. I think the only time I really worry is when the AI is just meant to purely dazzle and pacify us as we scroll where there isn't much authorial intent versus using it as a tool if you're an artist who just may not have the skills like I think there is a distinction there. I agree and I think like that's mostly like perhaps different product experiences like these models are general enough and like big enough that they can be using all sorts of different ways like if you want to build an infinite slot machine you can like we're not building that like it's a different choice.

37:53Some companies want to go there. We think this is much more of a creative system of sorts and we want to empower it. But that probably doesn't mean that others can do it. And I think you start to see this right now happening in the market where there's like slot machines on the one end, like just grabbing attention and trying to like optimize engagement. I think what we do is a bit more thoughtful because I think we believe of these models and these tools as eventually like creative tools for creative people, for really anyone. And that informs our ethos and our vision and our product experience altogether.

38:28I'm curious if you think movies and TVs will go the way of music in the sense that I saw, I think it was a Billboard headline recently that kind of blew me away where they said that at least one purely AI-generated artist is now charting every week. Maybe you shared that, I don't remember. But I saw it and I was like, whoa, that's crazy. And then I also thought ahead of this convo, is that going to happen to movies and TV? Are we going to have fully generated stuff that is performing at the box office or do you think it's always going to be hybrid? So I think the way we make films today, if you just think about media, traditional media, might be there still in the next 10 years.

39:08In the same way that we have theater plays in Broadway, those things are still there after movies and television was invented. So you might still do things the way PTA does it, does it. And I think that's great. I think ultimately there's a chance, a high chance that I'm pretty convinced will happen sooner than most people realize is that you might be able to stream pretty much every pixel to your screen in real time. And so you're going to eventually have this system that renders any sort of like world that you want, interactive or not, into any screen that you want. And that might be a different thing altogether that might not necessarily feel similar to a film.

39:52There might be hybrids where you can combine traditional filmmaking with this new thing. But the fact that you can render pixels on a real-time basis kind of changes the dynamic, the economics of streaming services, of platforms, of IP. And I think that's the thing I would say people are undervaluing and underestimating the most. Like the moment you can stream pixels on a real-time basis of anything you want, it's a different game altogether for media, but for also a bunch of different industries as well. How soon are we out from that? It's here. I don't think we're that far. I mean, it's probably there on the tech side.

40:26I'm sure you guys have that internally, but I'm just saying it's not productized at scale. I'm saying, when is it a productized at scale thing? It's not. I think the product part of it might come just from optimization parts. It's very expensive still, but when you want to figure out what the sweet spot of like quality and like speed. And if you want to maybe constrain some of the generations to specific applications, like a test that it just feels dramatically different from anything you experienced before. It feels, it breaks your brain a little bit. You're not sure that what you're watching and the fact that you can interact with it kind of changes a little bit of the paradigm of how we've used AI before.

41:03And even if we're like a few months away, like probably might be one of the biggest, and of course I'm biased, but of course I would say it's one of perhaps the biggest like next frontiers of AI is that you can simulate and generate pixels on a real-time basis in every screen out there. I am obsessed with world models. I do agree with you. I think it's a thing everyone's going to be talking about, especially next year. But before we go to that, Ellis and I both live in LA. The mood is, I would say, I don't know how you would describe it, Ellis. It's like not great. You know, it's kind of grim.

41:36Ellis:It's like a mix of not great and like highly buzzed on matcha, i would say which is not a good combo there's a lot of like out of work writers at all time uh in ellis's neighborhood like on a tuesday afternoon you know like i bring the tissues and they're all gone by the time i leave but do you think that has something to do with the eye or is something else structurally no i don't i think it has a lot to do with the government and the tax incentives and a lot of practical stuff that people don't talk about but yes there's already this mood and then there is you know i was just having lunch with like a talent agent last week and he's like this is all anyone can talk about right is ai it's going to take all our jobs everyone's already feels like their jobs are being taken i don't really see it as that two-dimensional i'm assuming you don't either but yeah i mean address this like topic of like is hollywood fucked or not um well i think you actually said something interesting which is like a lot of the causes for why Hollywood is in this spot right now has to do with something people don't want to speak about which is all the things people know are structurally not really working but they're hard to address which is tax incentives the strikes, there's projects being done overseas there's all the things that are just outside of AI it's similar to the water problem with AI, I don't know if you guys have tracked something out of it, it's like people who are obsessed with consumption of water of AI and if you plot that against every other water consumption of water in other industries, like golf courses consume 6 % of water in the US and data centers less than 1 % but fighting golf courses feels less interesting than being against AI and I think in media I felt a little bit the same where there's all these structural things about how the industry has evolved over the last 100 years.

43:34There was transition from detail to analog, to analog to detail, sorry, then like streaming, then like, then the cost of things just go to too high up, then like taxing, just all these things are structural to it. And then maybe 2 % is AI, but like fighting the structural things is like too complex. Just figure out the, you know, the easiest, like more interesting one is AI. Yeah. That doesn't go to say that like, it doesn't have an impact. I think it does have an impact and it will change it. But I would say what's happening with, I was in LA like last week. What's happening there has way more to do with other factors than AI itself.

44:09AI is becoming just like a scapegoat of sorts. But maybe going back to, I guess, the point you're trying to make. Yeah, I do think AI will radically change a lot of jobs. And that's an obvious thing. I mean, you're already seeing it within media. There's a lot of things that are very rote and repetitive that you can totally automate. And I think that focus shouldn't be on the jobs themselves. It should be on how do you upgrade or upskill the people doing those jobs, rather than like, oh, we need to protect that particular thing, because the thing might change. And it's okay, it's part of the process.

44:57Ellis:Just add a little AI, suddenly your business gets faster, smarter, and easier. Sure, AI can write emails, summarize documents, and come up with a lot of synonyms for magic. But what happens when it comes to your biggest opportunities or your toughest business challenges? Most AI tools will tell you that's a great question. Then they'll pull from public information and hand back a list of generic suggestions. That's not much help when demand suddenly spikes and you're trying to reroute inventory through a supply chain bottleneck halfway around the world. Solonis gives AI the context it needs to understand how your business actually works and where it can improve.

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45:54Ellis:of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. It's tough, isn't it? I feel like it's very easy to focus on job losses as kind of this de facto bad. But, you know, you look at Coca-Cola just released this new AI holiday ad made with AI. And this is a company that maybe would have paid an agency to do that in the past that employed a lot of editors and people.

46:41Ellis:And Coke's making$10 billion in profits last year, you know. So they have the money to spend on the agency and the editors. But at the same time, And I know you went to NYU Tisch and maybe, you know, you have some peers. I'd be interested to hear what they say. Any of the editors or visual effects people that might have worked on that, like a lot of them probably wish they could be directors or creators of some kind. But because of the bureaucracy, because of the, if you watch the show, the studio, the existing barriers to entry for becoming an actual creative with the resources to make a video happen, now you potentially can.

47:17Ellis:And I feel like people are talking less about that stuff. I think really it's just as relevant. The winner of the film festival of this year is a perfect example. He's a musician. He got into film now, not by this additional route, just by making something that feels great and people want to watch it. And he got approached by people because he made something he couldn't have done before. That, I think, is the greatest proof of how transformative and how new jobs are going to be created and are created by AI, I would say. I mean, I certainly feel that way. Like when I've been on internal marketing teams in the past, they're like, oh, you're just the copywriter.

47:55Ellis:like stick to the words bucko i'm like yo i was very nearly a film major at michigan i know more about movies than you do i can talk eisenstein i don't use premiere but in the future i'm gonna be able to make some pretty sick videos right now's the time to now's the time to the revenge to revenge yourself now you have all the tools exactly so uh alex you said you said world models are like the most interesting thing for you? Or that you believe in them long-term? I just think it's something everyone's going to start talking about. I think everyone's building towards that. Like you said, why is everyone obsessed with this idea of world models right now?

48:36Is it because it's how you get closer to AGI? Is it because it makes AI physical, all the above? Like, why do you think everyone's starting to buzz about it? And why are you excited about it? We've been excited about it for the last like four or three years, I would say. We built this general framework that we call general world models. And we made a video about the whole idea like three years ago. And it's become, I would say, our vision long term, which is, if you think about video models, video models, again, are simulating the physical world. And as they learn about the world, they understand how things in their world behave.

49:11They're understanding physics or understanding movements or understanding action and consequence. And then you can technically have agents being deployed in that simulation, interact with the world itself, move things around. Agents in the simulation.

49:26Ellis:Now I've got the chills. Yeah, I mean, everything's just a simulation of sorts. I'm the resident Matrix fan here. You start to see that the models learn about the world in ways that language models are not really learning about the world. and I think language models have gotten somehow bottlenecked but what they can scale and what they can do and a big way of unlocking them is to give them imagination is to give them like the visual capacity to simulate things and I think world models is like a catch-all term that describes this idea that you can have AI systems that can understand the world, how the world works and you can deploy agents within the world you can have consequences and actions and you can see them but also the model can see them and I think the reason why people are getting interested and more excited about it is because eventually that approach has infinite applications within pretty much everything you can imagine.

50:29If you can simulate how things behave in the world then you can think about applications in self-driving cars. You can simulate and improve performances of how you create algorithms for self-driving not by deploying cars, but simulating them, simulating how things should behave. Media and entertainment, you can simulate storytelling. You can simulate scenes. You can simulate specific things. You can simulate gameplays. You can even go deeper than that. You can simulate interfaces, which is something I think it's becoming more real. And so I think people are getting excited because it's becoming kind of like a big opportunity for more frontier research and at the same time, a huge market opportunity as well.

51:11Ellis:So you said the word simulate. I know historically with LLMs, people talked about probabilities and predicting the next word. Is that different in your mind, the simulation versus the prediction? Or is that kind of just the word for video or world models that's being used? I think simulation goes a little bit like maybe deeper. And so there's traditional simulation software. So if you think about, I know you're building a plane and you want to simulate like aerodynamics, There's a software you might use that basically you can put a geometry on an object and have like air flow and you can simulate how things will react.

51:46If you're, I don't know, doing life science research and you want to see how different compounds will interact, you need to simulate them, right? If you're building like, I don't know, some robotic experiments, you might need to simulate interactions within an environment. And these are all very hard things to do. You've coded them by hand. you kind of are looking at the world the way we've done simulation traditionally. So you have people looking at the world and trying to decode those things of the world in formulas and with human biases of how things we think work. But really what you want to do in like this new approach of AI and simulation and world systems and world modeling is you don't want to describe how things work.

52:27You just want to show the models the world and have the models understand those things in the world. And this is similar to how we learn. Like I can show you, I can drop something from my hand and you can kind of tell me what might happen, what you think might happen. You can kind of imagine it and simulate it in your brain. I'm probably sure you can describe the formula and the trajectory of that object, right? And so we're taking that approach with the world models, which is for models to understand how the world works, instead of trying to be very, all this like precise and have all these inducted biases on how we think the world works, you should just show enough data and the models become generalizable machines they can simulate those same things that we used to simulate before but not in those traditional methods you're going to like leapfrog them all together which is wild to think that they can do and kind of like they

53:15Ellis:do and it works um so yeah i'm just like so curious have the models incidentally discovered any novel fibonacci sequences about the universe that people haven't noticed or discovered yet I mean, it's just so fascinating. I mean, it's like if they're not built on these formulas per se and they're just kind of somehow doing it, it's like, are there going to be some Stephen Hawking-esque scientific discoveries to come? Probably. I think that's the bad. I think we're getting to a point where models are going to start doing really good scientific and research work. I think that's happening slowly and probably we'll see it more.

53:51yeah what are the societal cultural implications of world models as you think through it on i mean i do think i agree it's probably a new medium it's probably not quite right to call it gaming or movies it's like some kind of combination i'm sure someone will come up with a name but beyond that like what are the what are the implications you're thinking through of how we're gonna be all dealing with this i don't know uh i mean the fact that you can stream pixels in real time and simulate every possible world and interaction feels wild. It feels strange. It feels definitely there's going to be a lot of things we might need to prevent.

54:32And this is not only a runway. This is a society as a whole. There's a lot of things that are hard to fully understand until you've deployed them at scale. I do feel they're going to become the backbone of how we do a lot of economic work. And I don't think it's for one company to decide. I'm not saying like, hey, we're building role models, we've been working it for X amount of years. We're going to decide how the cultural impact of this is. I think it's for society to decide at large. I do feel like stuff like the film festival and other venues where you can highlight new generations might help inform those transitions.

55:06And maybe we need to do more of that. Just hear a bit more about the people at the frontier who are experimenting and kind of hear what they have to say.

55:13Ellis:It's going to be very interesting what happens over the next several years. I'm a gamer, and I follow closely all of the news about the ballooning costs of game development now. It's taking Rockstar Games more than 10 years to make the next Grand Theft Auto. So it seems clear to me that they're going to be a lot more indie developers now, which is really exciting because the tools for creating these rich worlds are no longer such a barrier. But I think there's also this risk that things just get kind of bland and vanilla. I remember playing the first No Man's Sky game. I don't know if you're familiar with that.

55:49Ellis:Of course. They're like, it's got thousands of planets and they're procedurally generated and then you go to one and there's nothing to do. and so I wonder what that new job is going to look like. People don't talk about prompt engineers anymore but I think as long as there's some intent and some human ingenuity that's being put into these requests for new worlds, new content, new textures, new ships, new costumes, then it's going to continue to be interesting and we'll just have more good stuff. In most film projects, you have this Bible of sorts which is a book that basically defines the world that you're like doing or building.

56:29It has art references, like script references, just description of characters. Like that is for the crew becomes like the reference point on how you make a lot of things. Like imagine feeding that Bible book to the model and being like, okay, here's the world. I want to, here are the rules in which I want you to like operate. And instead of describing every single interaction and every single thing, you might just provide the right references. You're telling the model, here's like the world I want you to envision with the references I've come up with. Now, the unique aspect then of like how you make it is not the engine that's making it.

57:03It's like, what are the things? What are the references? What are you trying to do? And we just come back to where we were maybe speaking before, which is at the end of the day, it's about the story. It's about like, what do you want to tell the world? I get this constant feedback from people where they're just getting to AI, where like you show them all these amazing videos and images and they're amazed by it. and then you give them runway and you give them the access to all of it. And the first thing they struggle with is like, what do I make? You've handled them like the most powerful machine they've ever had.

57:35And they're like, a cat and a dog. And then you start to realize that the bottleneck is not the way you make it, it's like what you want to make. And that's not going to change regardless of tech.

57:48Ellis:I think there's going to be a new golden age for idea guys like me, who are jacks of all trades with the different creative mediums and just kind of need those tools to bring the vision to life. You know, I mean, it's not like things are perfect with movies or certainly with Netflix right now where everything is just so blah and generic. And that stuff isn't even AI made yet. I think part of it is just very formulaic. Just like, you know how it works and you just want to repeat the formula. I think they're very tired of that. But to maybe connect this to what we were talking about earlier too, do you have advice like when someone comes to you and is like, or you hear about someone who works in a production house that's adopting Runway and or they freelance for them and they're like, okay, my hours are going down now because the amount of time that it takes to make things is being rapidly decreased by tools like Runway.

58:44and this whole kind of gig freelance economy that has traditionally powered entertainment and gaming, like it's really hurting as a result of like a lot of this change that's happening. What advice do you have for those people that I think rightfully do then have angst about AI and taking jobs and it goes into the water debate and all that? But like fundamentally what's happening is like work that people had is going away. Yeah, I think that's a fair point. I do agree. Some jobs are going to go away, but also a lot more are going to be created. I think the advice I have is, look, this is like, if you just put things in perspective, video models in the way we know them today are like a year and a half old.

59:24So you're like at the beginning of one of the biggest and most important like technological revolutions in your industry, you have the choice to think about this as a thing you will never use or like the thing you just have to learn how to use. and so the only advice I can consistently give people is like I would choose just like go and use it experiment with it like the rules and how you use it the combinations the workflows are still that to be invented like people are figuring out how to best make things with it and you can be the one like pioneering a lot of like techniques um not enough people are realizing that and I think when people ask me like how is runway going to be used with Avid or like with their like traditional way of working.

1:00:09I'm like, it's not. It's like, you can have fax machines or you can have the internet. The way you're going to transition from fax machines to the internet is not by connecting the fax machine to the internet. It's just by learning how to use this new thing, you know?

1:00:23Ellis:So your advice is go use my app, essentially. Go use AI. It's just, I mean, of course, you use Runway, but go use, like by now, if you haven't used any like AI model, like i think yeah you're missing yike i'll be like come on like like these things are insane they're so powerful like i think it's true yeah you have to but i mean the outcome that everyone hopes for that would be the best outcome is like people can do more work and people have more opportunity with these tools right i think everyone who's building these models for the most part thinks that way or tricks themselves sometimes into thinking that it's like that and i'm not saying I disagree with that.

1:01:05I'm just saying like that needs to happen for all this to work out, for people to not really hate AI, especially in creative fields. Like they need to get work and they need to not be working less because of AI. And there is this, I think we're just in this kind of messy transition period where people are adapting or not, and they're not sure what's on the other side. And I think that's the thing that that's the angst that I get asked about all the time. My assumption is like, well, things are going to continue to change really more rapidly. and so you either get in or you don't but things are going to continue moving at breakneck speed and so it doesn't really matter if you think it's not it will continue to like scale and change and so just try to get in like fast try to understand that there's nothing preventing people from like experimenting it's the greatest experimentation era for artists it's like i was i met this like filmmaker i was in a week ago i met this filmmaker that it's probably my childhood hero like someone I admire my whole life my whole creative career has been somehow inspired by all of his work and now he's like he wanted to meet with me so he went to finally like he's which felt like a dream but plug him who is this I don't think I hopefully can tell at some point but basically he wanted to I think he he went to a point where like this is I've seen enough stuff I experimented with enough with runway I get it this is the same thing I saw 30 years ago with like computers with detail, like compositing it.

1:02:30This is the moment for me to start breaking new ground. And that feels for me like perhaps an ethos that more people should like breathe. It's like, this is a time for you to imagine entire new ways of making stuff. And it's there. It's like up for anyone to grab. If I was an artist, like just, yeah, I would just do it. I can't believe PTA told you that, Chris.

1:02:51Ellis:I have one more question. Why do all my startup clients want to write and talk like you? You know, a lot of them send me your blog posts as examples. I mean, I guess part of it is you have an arts background. You're not just some PM turned founder, are you? But I don't know. Clearly, you're doing something right. I mean, what do you think is resonating with your thought leadership you put out into the world? Look, if I have to be honest, I don't think of what I write as thought leadership. This is just literally what I believe. and if I have to be honest when I was writing all of these things like eight years ago no one cared like it just felt like a very niche obscure thing to write about and maybe if I think about it right now you're asking about it why do you think I think people might resonate with it it's I think because it's just authentic like this is I'm not trying to like appeal to someone or like you know write the right thing for Twitter I think it's just like truly what I believe and I think one of the hardest things in AI these days is have original thoughts and authenticity.

1:03:55Like this is who we are. This is the company. And I think Runway has, we've done this for the last seven years. It's like the most consistent thing you hear from people is that the culture is very unique. It feels different. And I think we've cultivated that unique culture and that manifests itself in how we speak and what we do. I don't think we're trying to pretend. We're not performative. This is like literally like how we think about the world. And the fact that, I guess, the fact that that resonates with people, it's great. But we didn't change it before. It was the same before that is now.

1:04:28And maybe more people are realizing in a way. So maybe just be authentic, you know, try to have your own voice, which is sometimes the hardest thing to do. Word. Well, Chris, we appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on the show. Of course. Thank you guys for having me. Great chat. Thank you, Chris. Thanks to Chris for coming on the show. We're new here. We're a new show. please follow like subscribe everywhere you get your podcasts it means a lot to leave a rating or review we're also on youtube where you can watch this whole show in full video so check that out

1:04:58Ellis:access pod and if you're feeling so kind please share with a friend we're new out here it would mean a lot we need that dark social we got to get that thing humming dark social is important get the algo boost does anybody talk about dark social anymore no but they should uh you can find Find my newsletter at sources.news. Please check that out. And you could find me at Hamburger on Twitter and at meaning.company. Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producer is Shiraz Dume. We'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye.

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