Runway (company)

Runway AI, Inc. (also known as Runway and RunwayML) is an American company headquartered in New York City that specializes in generative artificial intelligence research and technologies. The company is primarily focused on creating products and models for generating videos, images, and various multimedia content. It is most notable for developing the commercial text-to-video and video generative AI models Gen-1, Gen-2 and Gen-3 Alpha.

Runway's tools and AI models have been utilized in films such as Everything Everywhere All At Once, in music videos for artists including A$AP Rocky, Kanye West, Brockhampton, and The Dandy Warhols, and in editing television shows like The Late Show and Top Gear.

History

The company was founded in 2018 by the Chileans Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala and the Greek Anastasis Germanidis after they met at New York University Tisch School of the Arts ITP. The company raised US$2 million in 2018 to build a platform to deploy machine learning models at scale inside multimedia applications.

In December 2020, Runway raised US$8.5 million in a Series A funding round.

In December 2021, the company raised US$35 million in a Series B funding round.

In August 2022, the company co-released an improved version of their Latent Diffusion Model called Stable Diffusion together with the CompVis Group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a compute donation by Stability AI.

On December 21, 2022 Runway raised US$50 million in a Series C round. Followed by a $141 million Series C extension round in June 2023 at a $1.5 billion valuation from Google, Nvidia, and Salesforce to build foundational multimodal AI models for content generation to be used in films and video production.

In February 2023 Runway released Gen-1 and Gen-2 the first commercial and publicly available foundational video-to-video and text-to-video generation model accessible via a simple web interface.

In June 2023 Runway was selected as one of the 100 Most Influential Companies in the world by ''Time'' magazine.

Services and technologies

Runway is focused on generative AI for video, media, and art. The company focuses on developing proprietary foundational model technology that professionals in filmmaking, post-production, advertising, editing, and visual effects can utilize. Additionally, Runway offers an iOS app aimed at consumers.

The Runway product is accessible via a web platform and through an API as a managed service.

Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion is an open-source deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022 based on the original paper High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models published by Runway and the CompVis Group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Stable Diffusion is mostly used to create images conditioned on text descriptions.

Gen-1

Gen-1 is a video-to-video generative AI system that synthesize new videos by applying the composition and style of an image or text prompt to the structure of a source video. The model was released in February 2023. The Gen-1 model was trained and developed by Runway based on the original paper Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models from Runway Research. Gen-1 is an example of generative artificial intelligence for video creation.

Gen-2

Gen-2 is a multimodal AI system that can generate novel videos with text, images or video clips. The model is a continuation of Gen-1 and includes a modality to generate video conditioned to text. Gen-2 is one of the first commercially available text-to-video models.

Gen-3 Alpha

Gen-3 Alpha is the first of an upcoming series of models trained by Runway on a new infrastructure built for large-scale multimodal training. It is a major improvement in fidelity, consistency, and motion over Gen-2, and a step towards building General World Models.

Training data for Gen-3 has been sourced from thousands of YouTube videos and potentially pirated films. A former Runway employee alleged to ''404 Media'' that a company-wide effort was to compile videos into spreadsheets, which was then downloaded using youtube-dl through proxy servers to avoid being blocked by YouTube. In tests, ''404 Media'' discovered that names of YouTubers would generate videos in their respective styles.

AI Film Festival

Runway hosts an annual AI Film Festival in Los Angeles and New York City.

References

External links

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{{Generative AI

Artificial intelligence companies
Companies based in New York City
Software companies of the United States
Text-to-video generation
American companies established in 2018
Technology companies of the United States