Will AI Kill Human Creativity? | Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela

I was basically describing this idea that I wanted to use AI to build creative and artistic and video tools, which in 2014 sounded like insane. Because you need to understand, I don't know if you guys remember, but the state-of-the-art in 2015 when it comes to AI was an AI model that could recognize if an image contained a hot dog or it didn't contain a hot dog. That's true. That's state-of-the-art. In 10 years, we've gone from not imagining AI being able to help creators.

A lot of what we see on screens, this is my personal bet, will be completely simulated or generated. You want software that's personalized for you, just like Doom, and you simulate the whole thing. The UI is simulated. It's generated on the fly. Like very soon, trust me, very soon you're going to have a completely generated experience that's fully personalized to you.

Monday. Yeah, this week.

Yeah.

Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me here and great to be speaking to you all. Yeah, so I guess on 4.5, definitely a big moment, a milestone. It's the best video model out there in the world, which is kind of a big deal. And we're a very small team compared to other companies. We're just around 100 people. And the story of Runway dates back to 2018. But first, the story of Christopher.

We have half an hour. This is the best part.

I grew up in Chile. I spent most of my life in Chile and Santiago. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I kind of just was curious about art and science and just wanted to experiment and play with things. Ended up doing econ as undergrad. But I also was building websites for companies on the side and I was also making videos. So I paid for my career, I don't know if I told you this, I paid for my undergrad in Chile making marketing and websites for companies in Chile. And so I was a one-man show that did all the edits, all the videos. I recorded people, I recorded ads and then built the websites and basically charged for that. And so after that, I thought I was going to follow a traditional econ route and work in policy and perhaps do a master's in economics. But last minute I found this small niche arts program and I said, why not? So it's a good thing to do. So I went for a year into a very niche experimental master's degree on, I don't know if you guys know, physical computing and electronics and programming and robotics. And I spent a year doing that and I fell in love with it. I started doing just research. Then I ended up teaching at that university.

No, this is in Chile. This is before I moved. This is like 2014 to 2015. And then in 2016, I came across some early papers on deep learning networks. This is very early on, everything we've seen right now. I mean, AI is decades old, but the last revolution, the deep learning revolution, starts around 2012, 2014, 2015. And I was fortunate enough to read some early papers and went into a rabbit hole that I just obsessed with. I was actually reading my scholarship obligation because then I got a scholarship and I went to NYU. And in the scholarship obligation, I was basically describing this idea that I wanted to use AI to build creative and artistic and video tools, which in 2014 sounded like insane. Because you need to understand, I don't know if you guys remember, but the state-of-the-art in 2015 when it comes to AI was an AI model that could recognize if an image contained a hot dog or it didn't contain a hot dog. That's true. That's state-of-the-art and that was insane at the time. That was it. And so I went into this rabbit hole, got a scholarship, and then decided to basically pack everything I had, which was just not a lot, leave it there in my mom's house in Chile, and then come for two years to New York to try to understand deeper and more perhaps with more time what this AI thing was all about. And my thought was like, it's just two years. So I'm going to go from 2016 to 2018 and then I'll come back. It's been 10 years. I haven't been back. And Runway was my thesis at school. So it was my graduation project. And the long story short is, Adobe was on my committee review, a senior researcher from Adobe was there, and he basically offered me a job after. Dream job. Two years in New York. I've never lived outside. One of the best companies in the world offers me a job. It would pay for my visa, for everything I would want. And I said no. I said no. I said let me try this thing.

It's a good question. You know, when we started the company back in 2018, I think many people thought it was just, first of all, not worth putting money or spending time on this. Like there was no, we just saw a video that it's amazing you can do this kind of things, but again, nothing of that was even imaginable within the window of what people thought was possible. I think we have just conviction of it's worth spending time here. And the second thing I think we realized was, I've never started a company, I've never raised money, I've never built a team, I've never published research. There's a lot of things I haven't done. And I think the motto or the mantra that we had back then was like, we just figure it out. If you put enough time and effort into it, you can pretty much figure out anything you want. And I think that culture and that ethos and that DNA of figuring things out and having very bold and ambitious goals is still embedded in the company. We have t-shirts that say just 'figure it out.' Like we just built a model that many people thought it was not possible to build because you needed billions of dollars of resources and it was so hard to compete. It's like, no, you could figure it out, and we did. So that mantra has kept alive within how we think about the company.

Well, first of all, I think creativity is way more than arts. You know, that's more of a common trap is to think about creativity only within the realm of artistic practice. So when we think about AI and creativity, people think about movie making or images or paintings or creative expression. I think creativity is a state of mind. It's a way of looking at the world. You can be incredibly creative as an investor. The way you think about the world, the way you invest. Messi is an incredible soccer player creatively in ways that perhaps no one else is. Creativity is a state of mind. It's a way of looking at the world. It's a way you understand what you do. And AI being the most important technology we've built as a society can help you be more creative in all those domains. And so in some ways it's going to augment, and it's already happening. The fact that you can do stuff like that we just showed you is allowing people to explore their creative minds in ways they couldn't do before. I'll give you an example. We have a security engineer, someone who's basically tasked with making sure we're safe as a company, infrastructure, very technical, backend DevOps person. When we were training one of our models, he just messaged me and he's like, 'Chris, I'm obsessed.' Why are you obsessed? He's like, 'Well, when I grew up, I never had craft skills, so no one really incentivized me to express things. But now I can just use Runway and type things and get things out of my head and they're fun and I feel creatively excited like I've never felt before. And I don't want to become a filmmaker and I don't want to change my career, but it's great. I'm exercising my creative brain, my creative muscle that I've not exercised in a while just for my own personal gratification.' I found that's amazing. That's what technology should be about. It allows you to do things that you couldn't do before and I think we need more of that in the world.

Yeah.

That's fun.

I think so if you look back pragmatically as to why I think we've managed to do what we managed to do, I think when we started working on this, no one cared. There was no idea of why this would even matter in the first place. And I think you build intuition and you build experience. If you try and you hit a wall and you try again, you hit a wall and you try again and you hit a wall. And if it works, and this is an incredibly exciting market, you should expect more people to come and follow you. That's obvious. If we didn't have the best companies trying to copy us, then it wouldn't be an exciting market. And now we have. But then we realize that once that happens, you basically go and set the tone again as to where things are going to go. And I think something we're really good at is we have long-term vision and strategy into how we want to see the world evolve and we build towards that. And it happens to be the case that within some particular length of time, you're going to have competition, you have other companies trying to get part of the market. But I think what has consistently differentiated us as a very small team is that we make these very bold bets on things that sound insane that eventually become obvious. And I think being able to consistently shift and move the window is kind of a special skill I would say.