A movie that transforms Runway’s AI. The founder of the $3 billion startup has a bold, new script: Building an immersive world



Artists like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas were ridiculed. Their work has been described by critics as “base”, “unfinished”, and the worst of the art. The exhibition, a commercial flop, saw 3,500 visitors. He was primarily distorted to express his fear with plain frames and individual brush strokes.

About 10 years later, Georges Seurat was launched Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte Island. 7 feet tall, 10 feet wide, Sunday It will be the most famous example of Point Rhythm, a derivative technique of Impressionism.

SundayThe central conceit of the film was simple. Detailed images of a lively afternoon in a park in Paris on the Seine. A closer look shows a clear spot of colour and light zoomed out on umbrellas, musical instruments, hats, humans and monkeys, now visible on the string. Each image can be unleashed and decomposed into individual points, i.e. pixels from the analog era. And there is a direct throughline between the surah and Impressionism and the total pixel space. Runway AI Film Festival (AIFF).

“Pixels are building blocks in digital images, with small tiles forming the mosaic,” says the film’s velvety narration. “Each pixel is defined by a number representing the color and position. Therefore, any digital image can be expressed as a series of numbers. Therefore, all photographs that can be taken exist as coordinates. All possible film frames exist as coordinates.

Jacob Adler, who created the Total Pixel space, is a classically trained musician and composer, and an interdisciplinary artist who rendered filmmakers with advances in AI. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, The Library of Babel, and the miracle that makes meaning in a random, vast world, Adler produced tens of thousands of images along the way, working on films for over a year.

“I was fascinated by the act of generating these images and generated all these philosophical questions,” Adler said. “In this vast linguistic combination space, the overwhelming majority of letter combinations is meaningful and nonsense. So we apply it to digital images. And is there a possibility that there will be a number of these images?

Runway, $3 billion AI video startuphas hosted AIFF since 2023 and has featured short films made with AI. This year’s festival (per total pixel space) marked Maglick Leaps, from 300 submissions at a small New York theatre in 2023 to the sold-out Lincoln Center Show with 6,000 submissions. Runway did not pick a winner – the judges, including directors Harmony Korine and Gaspar Noe, made the call, but the total pixel space reflects the way the runway thinks about its own future.

“We have all these new forms of media beyond the movies and games that exist in every space in the middle,” said Runway CTO and co-founder Anastasis germanidis. “Part of it may look like an immersive theater production with a fixed storyline, but you can experience it from a variety of perspectives and move around.”

Germanidis added: “Imagine these models really get better at creating realistic depictions of reality, and you have a world where you can essentially simulate most of what we care about when we navigate the world. It’s going to be both a very important issue.

Germanidis thinks world simulation as a rule above all else. It can be applied not only to stories, but also to biology, robotics, and physics. It is clear about finding ways to mimic physics and biology, not just humans.

“We want to be able to simulate almost every instruction you have in the physical world.” Cristobal barenzuelaCEO and co-founder of Runway. “We know it’s coming… AI Labs are very obsessed with simulating the human mind. But I think that might be a long-term approach.

The strategy is beginning this week as the runway plans to launch an interactive gaming experience. Pushing to the gaming market. Currently, the product is text and image generation, but it is expected to become more and more visual over time. The way this ultimately leads to worldbuilding applications is vague, and that’s part of the point.

“If there’s a given way to get there, it’s too late and that’s obvious,” Valenzuela said. “For me, it goes back to something creative (something)… If you’re not involved in a creative act, you don’t understand. People who have some form of creative expression in their work know that they don’t know exactly where they’re headed. You put them in a very vulnerable position to explore everything.

There is no shortage of competition for AI video generation on the runway. Openai’s SoraStability AI, Moon Valley, and Pikarabo. And the runway is in a position where you have to continue to distinguish yourself in order to compete. The company has raised more than $500 million so far from investors such as General Atlantic and SoftBank. nvidia, Salesforce Venture, Felix, Court. Meta reportedly approached the runway. To acquire the company this summer before dropping billions of dollars on AI of scale.

AI’s “Wake Up” Call

The history of art is a history of technological confusion, from the invention of the printing press to the emergence of “talkie” in the 1920s. Of course, the move of work was part of that story, and it has always been.

“Before the press, it was all the monks and people who knew how to share a particular story,” Valenzuela said. “Then, on the press, more people could read and write, and this was treated as an apocalyptic event.”

This is true. When the printing press was invented in 1440 and the adoption of the wider technology was invented, religious authorities worried about losing control, and the scribe’s guild was evacuated. But the world of people can be read now, and the story can be expanded.

Valenzuela brings up another example.

“Before an alarm clock is invented, we’ll hire a man who came to your door when you wanted to, and throw stones at your window,” Valenzuela said. “It was work. I didn’t have any family and if I had to wake up, what else were you going to do?”

In 19th century Britain and Ireland, these people were called “Knocker Uppers.” They tap on windows with long sticks or shoot peas with windows to awaken workers for shifts. With the invention of alarm clocks, it became natural for people to use alarm clocks. As ai slams on the windows of Hollywood, The trends that Valenzuela are directly involved are filled with industry responses, even when people are secretly using it.

“It was a bit of a dirty secret, whether it was on the runway or if he was a bit of a competition,” Michael Burns, vice-chairman of AIFF’s Lions Gate-on-Stage, gestured to Valenzuela. “I believe this tool is being used by everyone who doesn’t talk about the fact that they use it.”

Runway’s Germanidis says there are three stages of technology evolution. Make technology work, mimic existing art forms and create unique forms. We “started to enter that third stage, like a generative generative model,” he said. Of course, it doesn’t mean that everything should be AI. For Adler, an artist who has expanded fundamentally with AI, some things (such as surreal images and philosophical concepts) are suitable for AI, while others (such as complex human interactions) are not very clear.

“I see (AI) as a tool, but I’m not sure if I’m sure it’s a new genre,” Adler says. “There are things you can create with cameras that you can’t do with AI, and vice versa. That’s what you can do with AI that you can’t do with cameras.”

That alone is an incredible phenomenon that speaks to the excitement and horror that the runway and its video rivals are already being triggered across the world of art, media and entertainment. But for the founders of Runway, the real reward of AI vision exists far beyond the screen, as something grand, immersive and perhaps unrecognizable, if they can pull it apart.

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