Chris Valenzuela’s company began as a thesis project at New York University (NYU) and is now said to be worth $500 million.
Runway, a startup founded by Valenzuela in 2018, provides artists with a suite of tools to generate and edit media using artificial intelligence (AI). Its tools can write audio transcripts from existing videos, or create variations of existing images from text prompts. Last month, Runway AI announced I’m developing a system that can create videos from text prompts and images.
Many companies are experimenting with AI video generators in the race to innovate. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram parent company, Meta, announced last year an AI system that turns text into video, but has yet to release the technology for consumers to experiment with. Meta said on its website that it intends to publish it but will continue testing “to ensure that each step of the release is safe and intentional.” We responded by launching a website about generators, but not making them available. Google says on its website that it won’t release the model until it can address concerns about social bias and stereotypes.
AI video technology can help create content from influencer social media to Hollywood movies. All at once, anywhereAccording to Variety, Best Picture winner at this year’s Academy Awards used Runway’s video editing tools to create the film. But AI can also help bad actors generate disinformation that causes cracks in the social and political environment. Among celebrities and politicians, deepfakes, or AI-generated videos depicting someone’s likeness, are already a problem. A deepfake of Massachusetts Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren showed lawmakers saying Republicans shouldn’t be allowed to vote in the upcoming presidential election.A digital clone of Emma Watson reading my struggle It went viral online earlier this year. Innovations are making AI more usable and accessible, but the costs are unknown.
Despite the risks, Valenzuela wants to expose his runway tech to the world, he told the New York Times.
Twenty years ago, academics were debating the ethics of Photoshop for digitally manipulating photos, Valenzuela said on Gradient Dissent, a podcast about machine learning techniques. now, “‘‘Photoshop’ is a verb that can be used to describe something that has been manipulated,” he said. Like Photoshop, AI and generated content will become more accessible to consumers over time, he said.
There will be bad guys, but like similar technologies in the past, it will change most consumers’ lives for the better, he said on the podcast.
“Runway has content management tools and safeguards to prevent abuse of its technology,” said company spokesperson Brittany Catucci in an email.
Who is Chris Valenzuela?
Valenzuela co-founded Runway with Alejandro Matamara and Anastasis Germanidis, who attended the same program at NYU. Valenzuela serves as CEO.
He has a background in economics, business and design from his native Chilean private research university. After researching the work of artists and programmers using AI, he became interested in machine learning and his AI generation, and to study further he accepted a scholarship at NYU’s Interactive Communications program, he said. said in an interview with his Paperspace, a site for AI developers.
“The initial idea behind (Runway) was to create a platform that gives artists access to machine learning models,” he told Paperspace.
Runway, together with a research group at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, has developed Stable Diffusion, a system for generating images from text prompts. The system has seen a surge in popularity over the last year. It currently competes with top AI image generators such as DALL-E and Midjourney.
According to Forbes, Runway received $50 million in funding in December, valuing it at $500 million. That’s more than double his value after the previous year’s funding round valued him at $200 million.
