Hollywood’s hottest AI partner, with Runway’s Cristóbal Valenzuela

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0:53 Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. If you look at the history of art Like every time there's a breakthrough in technology, there's a breakthrough in art.

1:37 And that helps understand the world better, it helps artists communicate things they never could communicate before. Change is hard, it's it's you're afraid of it. These are very unpredictable times for the good and the bad. I think a the best state of mind is to understand that Yeah, change is the only constant these days. That's Chris Valenzuela, CEO of Runway, the AI Video Tools Pioneer. If you haven't seen the videos being created via AI today, you're missing some extraordinary stuff.

2:15 You're also missing out on one of the most contentious areas of AI impact, from Hollywood studios to the marketing world. While Runway has competitors like Google's VO3 and OpenAI Sora, the company is experiencing breakneck growth. It has high profile partnerships with the likes of Netflix and Disney, and its tools are being adopted by individual creators as well as everyday people. In our conversation, Chris talks about how AI is redefining both business expectations and our notion of creativity. He shares why he rebuffed advances from Meta for a huge payday acquisition and how today's AI video tools are a stepping stone to a totally new media format. Whether you're personally playing around with AI video tools or you're fearful of increasingly sophisticated video deepfakes,

3:06 Chris is a hands-on guide to the rapidly unfolding future. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is rapid response. I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Chris Velenzuela, co-founder and CEO of Runway. Chris, thanks for uh being here. Thank you for having me here.

3:31 I have to say the past few months I have become low-key obsessed with AI created video. Well, maybe not that low-key. I I I keep seeing these kind of mind blowing video clips. You know, it feels like there's been this inflection point in the tools and the usage. You released your your Gen Four model not long ago. You you had your Gen Alf video editing tool come out. And there are these these other tools out there too now. Google's VO3, which I see folks using. Of course, there's open AI, Sora, Midjourney. Like what's what's the difference between all these? I mean, are you all like utilizing similar engines? You know, or are the are all these things popping up now because the computer has reached like a certain Place.

4:17 It's a combination of things. Uh I mean, we've been working on this for almost seven, eight years. So There's a lot that we've learn, uh, after being kind of alone and building this I would say these days it's becoming more evident to many that the models are getting pretty good at tackling and doing a lot of different things. And so that becomes interest for obvious business reasons. Um all models are different. I think all models are trained for different reasons. Uh we tend to focus on professionals and uh folks who wanna make uh uh great videos but is um Amazing model we've released only recently, just a couple of weeks ago, allows you to modify and create video using existing video that was never possible before.

4:56 And so those kind of breakthroughs are Um just allowing, I guess, way more people to do much more interesting things. I mean your tools, I saw you in another video use voice prompts to create a video scene. Your your tools generate camera angles and change objects, the extending a scene outward, filling in what isn't there is is amazing. The the switching on the lights video that you have. Just for those who are listening, right? This video, we sort of see a cityscape and then Street lamps come on and the windows of office and apartment buildings start blinking and the lights are switching on and off in this very choreographed sequence. C can you explain how that was created? It took us like less than an hour to make that that video and

5:40 Um it it's you start with a scene, an ex initial video, and then you ask a runway for things you wanna change in that video. And so we could ask if it's daylight, we can turn we can ask the model just show me a night version of that same scene. And so what the model will do is it will understand what's in that scene. And it will turn down the light, like uh metaphorically, but also like literally, like we'll just like turn day into night.

6:04 Well maintaining pretty much The consistency for everything else, you might turn on the lights of the street. So Um and um you can be much more specific. You can be only turn the lights on the left or only turn the street lights, uh while keeping everything else dark. You can be like now start turning the lights one by one. Starting from the one on the left to the one on the right. Um

6:25 So in a way of um it's it's kind of a uh editing reality. Maybe you can think about it like that. You have a s an existing piece of content and you're working through that content with AI, asking it to modify it in whatever way you want, which is pretty fun to be honest. It's something I think We've never had the chance of doing ever before. And so it's it's really fun to play with. I've played with runway a little. It's awesome, but I I can't sort of write like a single n natural language prompt and get a full film yet. Right. I mean, there is craft and discipline to getting these tools to work at their potential. I mean, it are we gonna get to the point where like all you need to create a film is the idea for it, you know, the vision and like the production itself is all

7:09 Automatic? I think a c pre concept of what you mentioned was tools. This is a tool. It's a very powerful tool. And this tool allows you to do things that you couldn't do before. Um Knowing how to use the tool would always be important. And and the tool is not gonna do work on their own if you don't know how to will the tool, have you to use it in interesting ways.

7:30 And so uh I guess the answer for the question of like will you ever get to a point where you can just prompt something and get exactly what you want. I guess the answer is like kind of ish depends on how good you know how to use a tool. Right. So think about think about What tools people are y using today to make films? A camera, right? Can a camera help you win an Oscar? Of course.

7:50 If you have a camera, will you win an Oscar? No What makes a great filmmaker is like well knowing where to point the camera, like knowing where like how the camera works and functions and how you can tell a story with that camera. And I think that's no different from from how we think about A tools and runway specifically, which is It can help you go very far. You can do s amazing things with it. Just have to learn how to think with it and and and work with it. And if you know, then you'll get you'll get far.

8:17 I saw an AI video this morning from uh from director Matt Zine called Forgive the Haters. I don't know if you've seen this or not, but it's it's this commentary of sort of how traditional media folks and image experts, you know, people who are trained in this are being usurped by this new technology. And it's both kind of scary and encouraging. Which kind of feels like the way People's reactions to this tool are Yeah. Well I think it's not

8:46 new to be honest. I I think we have uh some sort of like social amnesia where we sometimes forget things we've lived through in the past. Like Filmmaking was very misunderstood by painters. Because we ask painters to judge a completely new medium. And so when when painters were judging photography or moving pictures. They were seeing it through the lenses of oils and and and pigments and brushes. And they were like, Well, photography will never ever get close to what I can express with a paintbrush. It's just a different medium. You you need to understand that it works differently and to think about it differently. And uh I think something similar is happening today where we're asking the painters of our times to judge and analyze this new thing. And they're gonna analyze it through the lens of what they know.

9:31 I think the invitation we've been trying to like encourage people to to think about is It's best to think about this as a new medium. It's best to think about the as uh Uh The camera was too too. painting and and you're gonna get the most value out of it if you kind of

9:47 break the assumptions or what expectations you have for this thing based on what you know on the past. That I think for me is the way you move forward and the way that I to be honest Most of the best filmmakers we work with Uh it takes them a while to realize this, but after you realize and cross that custom to understand that this is an medium, you start unlocking amazing things. You mentioned work that you do with with studios in Hollywood. I know you've partnered with Netflix and Disney and AMC Networks and whatever. Like how are they using runway's AI today?

10:20 'Cause I like AI can be a little bit of a dirty secret in Hollywood, right? Like people are using it but they don't always want to admit it. Yeah, I think uh it's a tool. It's that's the answer. And so the best studios and the best folks in Hollywood have realized that. And they're using it in their workflows to combine them with other things they know pretty well. Um the thing is that there there are no rules. You can start inventing them right now because this is pretty new. I mean a left is A couple weeks old. So people are figuring out things of using and ways of using the technology that we never thought of possible. And that's what I've

10:52 Enjoy the most. It's a general purpose technology. It can be used in ways that are um are diverse and creative and unique. And if you're creative enough, you're gonna uncover those things. At some point in the future there may be a whole different medium about the way you do it. Right now. Like I I can imagine they've sort of

11:11 But they take ideas and they create Essentially a prototype of Of a film to show to sort of get ideas through? Is that part of how it's used? You can think about like broadly speaking, two stages. There's pre-production and post-production. Pre-production is like, well, writing the script and and doing art direction and like selecting characters and casting and location scouting and just preparing to like make the stuff, right? And so there's there's many use cases of runway in there. Like of course the obvious ones are storyboarding and helping you with writing the script and helping you with like casting characters and sh seeing how how they're gonna like behave and what they're gonna do.

11:48 Um and then in post, once you film or re recorded something, there's a lot of visual effects and things that you need to apply and change to the videos themselves. And so let's say the example that we're speaking before turning like day into night. Let's say you've recorded something and it happens to be that like someone changed the script later and the shot that you recorded ha had to happen in at night. Well, the way you would do it before was that you had to go back and shoot again and like spend more time and re like fly the actress again and do the whole thing. Or Now you can go into runway and just ask the model to like turn that scene into night and it will like do it for you.

12:24 them coming to runway and typing get me uh uh multi award uh winning film now fast and cheap or more about well I have this problem It's very expensive to solve. I have a tool now that can help me Do it faster and better, kinda use it. Will it make my movie? No.

12:43 But it will help you very much in getting there faster and and cheaper. There was some a hubbub at at the Oscars uh about AI used in the Brutalist. Are we past that sort of taboo now? Is that not gonna happen anymore? Yeah, I think we are. I mean look, it's um it's new, it's misunderstood.

13:02 I I always argue that um You know AI is like a mirror these days because It's such a generalizable technology. It can be applicable to many different things, which make it so that we can project into it anything we want. So in in a way, the way we look at this technology. is a reflection or a mirror of how we look at the world. And so the people who are very excited about the world, new generations of creatives who are like unsh they want unshackle from like whatever they've they've they've done before and how the world works and have all the creative liberties, it's it's the most

13:32 freedom they've ever had. They can just make stuff without asking for permission. For the people who've been in the industry for many, many, many, many years and wanna not change anything of it, it's like Revolution, right? Or you want to prevent revolution from happening. Or maybe you want to encourage it, depending on why what's your mindset, right? If you're scared, AI might become like a perfect way of like mirroring that like Uh scariness of the world.

13:55 Some sort of a reflection of shirt's And um But I think part of moving away from that is having people Really experience and using AI in in their day to day's lives. If if you've if you if you've never used

14:11 video models or AI image models. If you've never seen how it works. There's only one answer to like forming an opinion on something you've never used, which is use it. And look, again, this is very new. Some models are a couple of weeks old. And so It's hard for people to like fully get on board on things that are moving so fast. But I think over time people have gotten better at I mean, Hollywood has gotten really good at understanding

14:35 both the limitations and the challenges, and that happens just because you're more exposed to it. Outside of Hollywood. Y you runway work with a lot of big corporations, Fortune One Hundred companies for their marketing efforts. Is is there Is there less pushback?

14:52 Compared to the film world because traditions of, you know, quote art are a little less precious. I think every industry has a different set of like concerns on like challenges that you have to manage and work with. Mm. Um like game studios have have different sort of like

15:09 Things you need to Make sure you can solve for In we we sell a lot to architects, for example, and and architects have also different sort of like standards and workflows and things they want to see into the products. I think they're all work slightly different, but the interesting thing is that you can

15:24 Help them all, if the models are good enough and they can journalize, you can you can solve them all. And the same tool could work across If you think about the challenge of an architect to render a video a video for a client showing them a building What they're trying to achieve is not that hard and similar from what a filmmaker is trying to achieve when they're rendering a building for like The Superman movie, right?

15:45 They're using different tools. But that's because historically those things have been separated. But now if my model can help you and learn how to do both, you then you can help With the same product. With the same experience. The same underlying model.

16:00 sold for those two use cases. Which is which is wild because then There's no verticalization of software they have to do. They don't have to do specific y UIs and just train better models. And if you train better models, like a lot of things will will happen. A lot of things will happen and a lot of things are already happening. I'm thinking back to the statement Chris made, there are no rules. What's both exciting and daunting. And given that, what kind of responsibility does Runway feel it has for making sure its AI video tools Aren't used for deceptive purposes. And how far out does Chris Plan Runway's business in an environment that's so dynamic? We'll talk about that, plus why he walked away from a potential acquisition by Meta.

16:47 After the break. Stay with us. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode.

17:29 I hope to see you there. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi.

17:48 And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Before the break, runway's Chris Valenzuela shared how the company's AI video tools are disrupting Hollywood and the very idea of creativity.

18:25 Now he talks about the risks and responsibilities of AI toolmakers, why Runway resets its roadmap weekly, and how today's video AI tools are just a stepping stone to something much, much bigger. Let's dive back in. I have to say, like personally, I get torn because as you can tell, like I love the creative output in in AI video and the possibilities. And at the same time, there are possibilities. That scare me a little bit about about uses, about job impacts, about unintended consequences. Like how concerned are you about people using your tools for deep fakes and scams? I mean I saw one news report about legal experts worried that videos in the courtroom will be harder to trust as evidence. Like, do you feel like this stuff is your responsibility to protect against

19:16 Or Like You know, you're just a toolmaker and that's it's not really your role to get into those use cases. I think it's a social

19:26 responsibility to like bring everyone up to speed and like help people navigate through what are the good and the positive and the great outcomes and what are the things that we should be preventing for. And this this happens with like every technology. Think about cars. Like I mean cars are amazing has gotten us to There's also like great dangers in cars. And so we put norms and safety, like and and seat belts, and we require you to like get a line a driver's license. There's all this like things we've collectively built together

19:58 to understand that this powerful technology can get us very far. With the right safeguards. And It's not the responsibility of a company or like one person, as much as society as a whole to first recognize the importance of the Denglu itself And then understand where it can be

20:16 either improve or pre-prevent it for any misuses. At the same time as you're sort of managing this um this technology shift. You're also managing a a business shift. I mean, your business is grow is growing very fast. Um I know that Meta reportedly approached Runway about an acquisition earlier this year before spending$14 billion on scale AI. Uh aside from the money, like What sorts of calculations go through your mind in considering whether to stay independent? Um I think I'm having too much fun, to be honest. I care I care I care too much about this. I think we'll be

20:55 a mess if we like sell the company now mostly because We know exactly or we have a good sense of I think extrapolating where things are gonna go, uh, in terms of like performance of models and qualities and use cases. That I I w I wanna be the one building it. And I mean th that's what we've got in here and and there's such a big opportunity to like make the world much more creative, help artists like tell stories that we haven't told before and I want to be the one leading that.

21:23 With w with my own kind of like vision and like being own of my own destiny in a way, you know? So yeah, it's it's just it's too fun. With The AI Tools evolving so fast. It can be

21:37 Hard tech. anticipate where the puck is moving to, you know, and I'm curious like how much are you like, yeah, I know what I'm building toward. It's this, you know, vision versus how much has to be kind of reactive and adaptive that that you can't know. you build some sort of intuition over time, I I would say again. I think this happens with like think about the best athletes, like Uh when I think Yokovic was speaking about this in an interview very recently where like he was He knows when and how to hit a ball without having to think about it.

22:07 Because his body has been trained for years for that. And every time he thinks about it, he fails. Because he gets too much into his head and like starts overthinking it. But he doesn't think about it, he just knows because like his body has been trained for that. I think as an organization we've been trained

22:23 for years to like understand kind of where it works, where it doesn't work, where things are heading, what's worth paying attention to, what's worth like focusing research on Um And that intuition is very valuable. Specifically when The world moves so fast, there's so much information you have to digest.

22:37 That if you don't have a good sense of what signal versus what noise You're just gonna have a hard time parsing and understanding what's worth paying attention to. Uh I think that for us is incredibly important. Like it's it's more of an art than a science, to be honest. And it has to do with just being good at that the that learning and and having that experience. And and how far out do you think of your like product?

22:58 Road map. You know, or is or is that something you're like reassessing All the time. Yeah, I mean it's it's a weekly thing, to be honest. It's it's uh It's it happens like if you're planning on a quarterly basis, you're not gonna make it. That that that hap I I think

23:13 I strongly believe that for many years, and I think that's evident now for public companies. If you're planning on a like eight month long process, you're done. Like it's it's in four weeks, you're like gonna get leapfrog and like things will change. We have long term visions and we have long term ambitions of where things want we we need to take them. We've historically taken this like open ended research approach, which is you can think about it as You define instead of defining very specific goals you want to accomplish, you define the boundaries on which you want the team to like play and experiment.

23:45 And then setting the boundaries and the limits is kind of the hard thing because if it's too open then like There's nothing really like directionally had happening. If it's too broad, then it's it's just an objective that's very clear. If it's like broad enough and has enough of their right incentives, then people are gonna stumble on things. That are new, that you've never thought of before, that have a great value.

24:06 And those are the things that we care the most. Like that open ended research approach that's less focused by goals but much more by stepping stones of like discovery and learning. It's like a a change definition of the way a lot of startups begin, right? Usually there's sort of there's a customer need or a pain point or a use case that you're trying to solve for. And what you're talking about is sort of a it's a very different way of approaching it, right?'Cause you don't you don't even know what you're gonna be solving for. Yeah, uh it's it's very different. Again, it has you have to recognize the speed of technology and how

24:42 fast things are changing. So if you don't recognize that I think you're You're not being honest with like how your plan will change over time. And and I think you're right. Product has historically been very Like

24:55 structure and like you know a goal and you're gonna know a customer and you know how things are gonna go. And overall you don't expect things to change that much. I think what's becoming reality these days is research on product should become part of the same. Like if you if you're just a research company, you're gonna miss out on product and there's no feedback loop from customers, you're not learning from the real Use cases. If you're a product company, you're gonna get lit for it by research.

25:18 And Again, it's Part of it is you have to be there building those two things together. You have to be willing to try things quickly. I mean you can build prototypes in like And few minutes that used to take you months to build.

25:31 And because you can do that, you should do that. Like you have to do that. Of course, someone else will. I mean, if you're not, someone else will. Like that's how businesses in AI go from zero to like a billion in like A couple of years, even months. Like it has never happened before. There's no scale of adoption and And again, that's because Models are getting better, performance is getting better, models are improving themselves. You just have all these compounding effects. Distribution is also like pretty much built, so shipping products to people is pretty straightforward.

26:01 If you're thinking about a product roadmap that's a year long You're not gonna make it. They're gonna make it because all the assumptions of things You thought gonna be right. on January or perhaps in February already like either wrong or obsolete. And so you have to change again.

26:16 So change is the only constant I would say these days. I was reading that you s you said at one point that AI video is like a stepping stone to creating 3D virtual worlds, what you call the totally new media format. Is this like the metaverse? Is this the next frontier of video gaming? Like I I know you've talked about launching an interactive game experience, or is the game stuff just like part of the stepping stone? Stones that you're talking about. I think it's part of the stepping stones. Uh My assumption is that I don't think we have the language to describe that thing, to be honest. Because if you think about linear and nonlinear media, linear media being films and ads and videos and things that are you play them and you play them again, and it's always the same thing.

26:58 Um, there's a way of doing those kind of things that we know pretty well. And we can optimize, we can um change, we can make it cheaper, we we'll continue doing that. Games are nonlinear. experience something slightly different, or you can branch and do different stuff. But those worlds and those games I'm still being creative top down. There's the game designer, a builder, you know, everything has been kind of pre-programmed in some way. So you're exploring some sort of like a World that was pre designed.

27:25 If you if you think about this idea of getting video or AI models to work in real time. You're stepping into something perhaps different from those two mediums, right? the rules of those worlds have not been prescripted or designed by anyone. They're just being generated on the go.

27:42 Um, it's not linear in the way that you've experienced film before, because like it's not gonna happen probably the same way if you play it again. Um how do we call that? I don't know. So we're only gonna get to the language to describe this new medium by having people experience it. Which is happening right now. I saw that runway's looking into sort of future revenue streams potentially in in robotics and self driving tech, which surprised me at first, but I suppose this sort of aligns with like

28:08 Three D world Kind of mapping, right? Correct. Yeah. So If you solve for again, it goes back to what I mentioned before, these models can generalize to tasks and uh kind of things they weren't specifically trained for, like really reconstructions or editing videos, and you can extrapolate that that will continue to happen in different domains, like robotics. One of the hardest things for robots is getting the data to train it on a particular set of tasks. So you have to simulate that data. The way simulate that data is very expensive.

28:37 Unless I can just Generate the data, you know, simulate it, like modify it, alter it. It's not that different from a movie. Um it's just so you're creating that that same movie that you talked about in the beginning with the lights coming on, you yes take that environment and you feed it to the robot. Correct. So that's a great example. Think about your pl you're training a robot to like, you know, in LA, there's like these robots that do like deliveries. You might want to train a robot to understand how like light like inf impacts the sensor. And so what you need to do is just have to show them a bunch of examples of light changing. Well, how do we do that? Well, we have to like go in a studio or go into the streets and wait for the light to change and we'll create it artificially and

29:16 Or you can just go into runway and ask model to change the light ten thousand times for ten thousand different videos. It's moving pixels on a screen. Everything that will be moving pizzas on screen will be probably generated with the eye very soon. And and are we gonna know the difference between, you know, you and I watching each other On video like this a and whether that's

29:38 Uh. for real, I don't even know what I mean by real anymore, versus something that's been You know constructed or adjusted via AI? I mean does it matter if I tell you I'm generated and this is a pre recording? Like will it make the conversation less interest?

29:55 I'm not. I'm not, right? But like as a provoke at the events, like If if People find come forward and it helps them and it help but I mean think about teaching, for example, like having this conversation with a personal tutor that's able to answer your questions real time, but also like show you physically how things work. Let's understand physics. So let's bring something, let's do an experiment now. I'm gonna show you how it works. That's great. Why would it care if it's real or not? It just learned something, you know?

30:22 But a world where I I'm not sure what's real and what's not. Doesn't so Make you one easy. When you go to the watch a film today in the theaters, do you question if the movies are real or not? But I know'cause it's a movie, I know that it's not real, whereas something could

30:41 hit me in some other way and I I I don't I it's not sort of already framed out as being, okay, this is uh an entertainment experience. But that depends on like the the format, right? The medium of of like how you're experiencing it. So if I'm if I'm tuning in into watching something, I'm already tuning myself to understand that what I'm watching is not real. Of course if I You s you want a Zoom call and the person is like deceiving you to like Pretend they're real, of course. That's strange. That's weird, right? But for me again, that's a social norm. Like if you do it, you're probably like It's not gonna work, right? Um

31:16 But but from a fictional side, from a storytelling perspective, you I think we agree on like we're gonna fall we we like falling for it. We you like going to the theaters and Seeing you know that what you're seeing is not real. But but here's the thing. We had this before. One of the first films ever shown is a train arriving to a station in Paris. It's an old film. It basically shows a train arriving to a station. Uh the story goes that when they first the Lemir brothers when they first show that film in uh late eighteen hundreds of People run into the theater.

31:45 And they run because they thought they saw a train arriving to a station, so just like run, the train is coming. We'll laugh now, but like if you've never watched moving pictures on a screen. You're probably figuring out. Right, until you've watched enough where you're like, Okay, yeah, I know Superman is not real. People don't fly. Like I get it. I and I like it. I wanna go there because it helps me to relax or whatever. Um

32:07 Yeah, so I think just exposure also also. I mean, we're we're we're clearly not short of sort of dystopian AI predictions. Do you do you have a vision of a kind of utopian AI future world? I think more of an optimistic. I I think the interesting about AI is that we've always associated with science fiction, you know? Terminator and Black Mirror and like HAL 9000 and all the things that are Just science fiction. Um

32:33 I do see a world because I'm seeing it right now where AI's become an incredibly creative collaborator and a source of uh excitement and happiness to many people. And I think part of it is like You just have to like See it pragmatically. You have to see people use it. You have to see how

32:52 people's lives have been changed for the good. Of course there's misuses and we can prevent them and we'll work around it as a society. Again, this is a responsibility for everyone, not just just one single company. But I think overall I'm very optimistic about people using technology. I'm I I started working on this because I've I like the history of art. And if you look at the history of art Like art and technology are intertwined all the time. Like every time there's a breakthrough in technology, there's a breakthrough in art. And that helps understand the world better. It helps artists communicate things they never could communicate before.

33:22 That's great. Like would would we fight against artists being able to like do things they couldn't do before to express and tell us things about the world that we never thought of before? Of course not. I think that uh I think overall I'm an optimist and I think if you're an optimist you can you can you can think about the world slightly different just just thinking about all there are things that can go wrong. So what what's at stake for uh for runway right now? What's the stake?

33:45 A lot. I mean we're just Just getting started. I know it's it's uh It's um It's the realization that these tools are and these models are gonna become way more useful and powerful to many to many than we ever thought. The tech is a very important thing.

33:59 changing so fast and has already changed so fast, and it can already do so much stuff. And yet at the same time, as you say, like it's early. Oh it's so early. It's so early. Uh Getting a state of uh

34:15 Embracing uncertainty, which I know it's hard because like you you want humans want predictability. Change is hard. It's it's you're afraid of it. Um it's always more easier to be more predictable about things, but I think these are very unpredictable times. For the good and the bad. And and I think a the best state of mind is to understand that Yeah, change is the holy constant these days. Well, Chris, this has been great. Thank you so much for doing it.

34:38 Of course. Thank you for having me. It was a fun chat. I do love the creativity coming out of new AI video tools like Runway. But I also want to hark back to the business creativity that AI is sparking and requiring. As Chris said, if you're thinking about a product roadmap that's a year long, You're not gonna make it. That rate of change may apply more to startups and AI developers, but we all need to adjust our speed to meet the moment. Are the days of a true two year or five year roadmap gone?

35:11 I don't know. But one thing's for sure. We can't be so shackled to a set vision of the future that we neglect the evolving realities of today. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.

35:25 Rapid response is a wait what original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our producer is Alex Morris. Associate producer is Mashumaku Tonina. Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastanelli. Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday.

35:51 Our head of podcast is Le Tal Malad. For more, visit rapidresponesshow.com.

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