Cristobal Valenzuela, co-founder and CEO of Runway ML, explains why building usable applied AI products requires a fundamentally different capability than AI model research.
Insight
Valenzuela: Creative AI succeeds early because creative workflows tolerate 80% accuracy
“And in research, going from 80% to a hundred percent is really hard. I think that you'll be seeing that in, like, autonomous vehicles where, like, it's always, like, two years ahead and, like, always 80%, but, like, that 20, 10% is just really hard. This is re…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Valenzuela: In decades, AI art will be seen as a natural, necessary transition
“What are we going to be asking ourselves in like, 1020 years, 30 years? I think it's the realization that we'll look back and we'll look at this moment as in like, yeah, I mean, it was a natural transition and we needed it. It allowed us to do so many things t…”
Insight
Valenzuela: It takes 12-24 months to understand new AI breakthroughs
“The moment something gets released, like, let's say transformers or a particular piece of technology that you think would be interesting or could be worth experimenting with, I think it takes a collective set of months, like, 12, 24 months sometimes to underst…”
Disclosure
Valenzuela: Runway had to own its AI stack to push creative tools forward
“If we really want to make and move the standard of like creative tools in the ways and vision that we had to own our stack. And so we started building this research team, right?”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Valenzuela: Multimodal AI will merge previously siloed creative software tools
“I think a common natural evolution of just the creative stack or the creative software solutions out there, they tend to be very specific to domains of content. So you have a tool that's specialized on, like, Image editing. And then you have a tool that specia…”
Disclosure
Valenzuela: Runway operated without a dedicated product manager until April 2023
“Until like two weeks ago, we didn't have a product person. Product was led by a combination of research design and engineering.”