What does AI-powered content creation look like? with Runway ML’s Cristobal Valenzuela

**Cristobal Valenzuela** (0:07)
I was speaking with this director who was working on a film, was using Runway, and he came up with this idea of when he was chatting with his editor, he was like, we should just Runway that.
I'm not constrained by the time and the cost, I'm constrained by whatever idea I think works the best. And that's just phenomenal, right? And so our goal, and I think our goal still is, is not to build this kind of autonomous systems that don't engage in any sort of relationship with humans or with creatives. On the contrary, it's like, you have humans coming up with great ideas and they want to express those ideas. How do you build systems that will help them get there really quick?

**Sarah Guo** (0:49)
This is the No Priors podcast. I'm Sarah Guo.

**Elad Gil** (0:52)
I'm Elad Gil.

**Sarah Guo** (0:53)
We invest in, advise and help start technology companies.

**Elad Gil** (0:56)
In this podcast, we're talking with the leading founders and researchers in AI about the biggest questions.

**Sarah Guo** (1:07)
We're thrilled to have Cristobal Valenzuela on today's episode of No Priors. He's the CEO and co-founder of RunwayML.
Runway is a web-based tool that allows creatives to use machine learning to generate and edit video. You've probably seen Runway's work in action. Visual effects editors have used Runway to create visuals on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once. Cris, welcome to the podcast.

**Cristobal Valenzuela** (1:28)
Thank you for having me here. Super excited to chat with you.

**Sarah Guo** (1:32)
So can we start all the way back? I think you are the only person I know with degrees in economics, business, design, and then also went to art school. How did that happen? And then how did you stick an interest in ML in there that became very real at some point?

**Cristobal Valenzuela** (1:45)
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I've always been very curious about just things in general. And so we're trying to like find ways of channeling that curiosity. And I'm originally from Chile and I studied in Chile a combination of like business and econ and then went into design. And it was a very particular design kind of like program. I spent a lot of time with physical computing, which is like working with hardware, with like electronics mostly applied to design and like art. And while I was doing that, I was also consulting. So it's kind of like for a moment, I thought I had like two lives.
I was like doing art on the one end with like Arduinos and electronics. And on the other side, I was like consulting for these banks, which was very like different, but I love it. I think it's perspectives and worldviews that are very opposite. At the same time, you gain from being at both.
Long story short, I kind of like fall in love or was experimenting with early computer vision models in 2016, 15, and then went into rabbit hole, apply and got a scholarship at NYU, and then spent like two years in art school.
ITP, that's the name of the program. It's a very unique program for me, though it's very fundamental kind of like piece in my career of like understanding how to breach business, design, art, and technology in a cohesive way.

**Sarah Guo** (3:04)
Amazing. And now you have one life that combines those. But in the art side, how should I picture or do we know electronic art?

**Cristobal Valenzuela** (3:13)
Media arts probably is the best way of describing it. I think for me, media arts is a way of like expressing a worldview using technology, like any other form of art. Like you just kind of like experimenting and reflecting and expressing a worldview using a piece of like a tool. And in this case, like it happens to be that we like to express it via like computers and software and writing software is a form of art and making hardware is also a form of art.
One thing I remember early on in my career when I was doubling between like art and business, I met this very famous Chilean artist, this is a photographer and he was just like mentoring me and like we were chatting and he was speaking and he was like, Cris, this is the same world. We all live in the same world, right? It's the same, right? We just build like silos and like arbitrary definitions of what is what. I think he just said it. I really like stuck with that. And I think that's how I like to look at the world. Like it's just the same world. You can apply different points of views and perspective on that. We build arbitrary like definitions of like, this is art and that's like design and that's econ and that's business.