YouSaid · the spoken record

Cris Valenzuela

lines on the record: 76
first: 2025-06-05
most recent: 2025-06-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, if someone likes making that, I don't think there's nothing wrong with it, right? I think, look, I think there may be independent voices out there that have never had the chance of telling their stories because they don't have the means to tell it. Our vision of runway is the best stories have yet to be told. We haven't heard from the greatest stories of the world because maybe they just weren't born in LA. That probably is the case, right? And so I think we're going to see a much more democratized version of film. We're going to have a version of storytelling that's for everyone. And the bar for it will be the ideas. It won't be who you know in industry or how much money you have. It'll be like how good is the thing you want to say and how good are you telling it?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last question If you had to spin that all the way out, you're successful, the AI industry can pull this off, the models get the capabilities you want them to look. What does the film industry look like 10 years from now?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sound would just kill the essence of filmmaking. And an argument that they had was like, who's going to pay the orchestras that are paying in the theaters, right? Well, it's true. Yeah, we don't need orchestras in theaters anymore. But also the technology gave birth to an entire new industry of artists, like Hans Seimer, like, I mean, that was birth, that was the beginning of an entire new industry birthed by given by technology. I think this is for me very similar, where like, yes, we're going to lose some jobs. Our job should be to train those people to do new things with technology.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I understand the concern, but I think the obsession should be on people more than jobs. We used to have people that press buttons in elevators. That was a job. I don't know if you guys remember this. That was a job. There was a job of people throwing stones to wake you up before alarm clocks were invented. I think no one is saying we should protect people throwing rocks because that's a job. We should have alarm clocks and the person who's throwing rocks to wake you up should be taught how to do something else, right? And so you focus on the people and how you upskill and upgrade and learn and teach people to new things rather than like, hey, let's keep this thing. Because we need people pressing buttons in elevator and that's a job. I think that happens. That has happened in Hollywood many times. When Hollywood at the beginning was silent, it was silent movies. Talkies came around. It was a major breakthrough where you can actually have sound in movies. The industry revolted. Like Charles Chaplin, one of the biggest advocates against films with sound because he said that”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Concern from that class of people that we hear all the time is this is great, it made it made everyone's life a little bit easier. It also put half of us out of work. Do you see that as a real threat or as a real outcome?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“6000 submissions work with the American cinema editors, which is one of the guilds of the editors, work with Tribecafen Festival, so by industry partners, and it's a great way of understanding how it's actually being used in real production use cases and how valuable it is for not only the insiders, but also the new voices. I think part of the gap is you need to go to the film festival to experience it, and you probably get a sense of how useful it is.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Possible to close that guy. You know, I don't see that GUB that often. I think in film, there's the idea of below the line and above the line. Goes your weekend. You're going to be working on pushing those edits every day, and you do need by hand. And so if you have a tool that allows you to do it faster, of course, like you will use it. It's great. It will get you where you need to go faster. I think the gap there is not as big as people, some people might think, because the actual creative minds, the producers, the editors, the BFX artists already embracing this. And it's very valuable because I'm not surprised about your stats and number. I think still the above the line, the people who think about creatives as like, oh, have never had the experience actually working and sitting it might have a different assumption of artworks. Again, I think part of it is just like we need to show you how it actually works. And something we do is we have a film festival here in Europe, by the way. If anyone here wants to go. We've done it for three years now. It's in the Lincoln Center. It's a major event. It gathers filmmakers from all the world. We started the festival with 300 submissions. This year we got...”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Degenerative fill is used as often as layers, which means everyone uses it every day. And then the audience is like, I hate this. Make it go away. And there's just this gap. It's a moral gap. It's a psychological gap, whatever it is. There's a gap between how people are using it and how they talk about it and how they feel about it, particularly with creatives, particularly with artists. I know you spend a lot of time with creatives. How are you closing that gap? It's impossible to close that gap.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me show you how it works. And then we showed you how it works. And he was like, Yeah, now I'm on board. It took me like 25 minutes. And I think he was very adamant of his position of being very against AI because I realized he just had the wrong expectations about what it did. And I think it was a minute of like, okay, let me show you what it does. It's like you've never experienced this before. We forget this, but we all had to go through training to send our first email. Like people were just didn't know how to send emails and you have to go through it. You just don't understand it. And so you start using it, you understand the limitations of it and understand the constraints of it. And then you start using it. I think a lot of the hard takes on ID states, I think, are based on just the run expectations and run assumptions of what AI actually does.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think, again, summarizing the entire AI industry as chatbots and what one company is doing, I think it's a mistake. I think, again, video and media works very differently. And there's a lot of other considerations. I think a lot of the assumptions around how AI works that I've seen around video is like having an opinion around cell phones in 1992. You're just probably very early on seeing the impact about how that technology will change in this stream. And probably you've never experienced it before. And so I think part of what I think is going to happen over time is that a lot of these ideas around concern and copyright and other considerations will start to change as people understand how this actually works. Like I'll give an example. I was in a dinner with a producer of a major show you probably have all seen. And he was like, I'm very anti-i. Like, okay, why are you anti-i? It's like, well, because it works like this and it does this. And it's like, no, it doesn't.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If OpenAI loses its case against the New York Times and training on the Times content is found to be infringing the floodgates will open, it is not clear if opening AI will win or lose. If Meta loses its cases against the book publishers, they're not doing great in the past couple weeks. The floodgates are open. If those floodgates open is your business tenable?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“YouTubers are on the copyrights to their videos. If it comes out that you train on YouTube and hundreds of YouTubers come ask you for money at whatever rates is the financial model of runway still tenable?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a variety of different data sets that we use to train our models depending on the task. It's not about do we train on this and that. We have agreements with different companies. We have partnerships with others. The way we train is very unique to us. It's very competitive there. So we're never probably going to tell how we do it because it's very unique to how we train our models.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We train on a variety of different data sets. And so we have teams working on image and video and text and audio. We don't disclose how we train our models because that's unique to our guest.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Myself an outsider to tech. And I think one thing I would consider is that not everyone operates in the same way. I think not all companies are the same. Companies tend to be different in how they operate. And I think there are different ways of managing through this change, and it's hard for me to group everyone in the same and say, yeah, all tech companies are basically doing the same.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hard for me to have an opinion on every single case out there. I think it's more complex than that. I think Google has been a great impact in the world at large. I think it's hard to disagree on that. I think the world has gotten way more expansive information has become more accessible to many. I think that's hard to disagree, right? I think there's definitely new challenges with every new technology. I don't disagree with that. I think it is. I mean, you are putting really powerful technology in the hands of everyone, which means everyone, right? So there's like use cases around AI that you should be preventing and you should try to make sure you have systems of regulation and safety on top. I think every company is different. So I think it's hard to, one thing I've really learned about About Tech, and I mentioned this as an artist. I went to art school and I started working on tech mostly as a way to have my vision around how art should work with tech. That was my idea. And so I still”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tech companies broadly are not thought of as young and cute anymore, right? Like no one thinks of meta and Amazon as Google is like adorable companies that should build the future and the way that they were at the time. Have you thought about the risk that They might lose these cases and what that would do to your business because this dynamic you're talking about about whether this is a non-infringing use, whether there's broad utility here, yeah, this argument goes back to the Betamax case in the 80s. It's all there. But it doesn't have to go the way that it always did, right? Judges are just a bunch of guys as we've discovered here in America. They just make decisions. What if it doesn't go your way?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That argument is weaving its way through the legal system right now. There's lots and lots of court cases. The last time we went through this, it was basically Google that won a bunch of court cases about building databases, maybe different. But Google is like a friendly young company that slides in the office, or beanies when they got to work. And the inherent utility of Google search, like very obvious to every judge, the inherent utility of YouTube, which got in a lot of trouble. Very obvious to every judge, and they sort of like horsepowered their way through it. Like, they had to pay some money to some people and they had to win some cases. They had to invest a lot into litigation. And they won because they were cute and they were Google. And it was a very different time.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I know. But I think I grew up in Chile and there's a lot of films I didn't manage to see and the way I saw it was I bought them, bootleg streets corners and I don't know if you ever saw one of those where people stand in the theater and just record the thing. Yeah, I mean, that was a bad use of like cameras, but I think the overall assumption of society was like let's not ban cameras. Let's actually have a norm in theaters where you can't do that. And if you do, you're going to get in trouble. I think we all agree it's like, yeah, that's a good thing to do.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so again, so we've done partnerships to get data that we need in particular ways, but again, it's really important to understand that these models are not trying to replicate the data, right? I think the common misconception is that, and I get this, where people thought that you can type a scene of a movie and you get the scene of a movie in Runway. Like these are not databases. So they're not storing the data. They're learning. They're students. They're learning about data. They're getting patterns within that data. And they'd use that to create something net new. And so the argument I think that it's really important to consider is that these systems are creating net new things.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To train the model, you need to ingest a huge amount of data, right? The two things that make the models more effective in an expansion mode are more compute and more data. Have you thought about whether or not you're going to have to pay for the data you can get a model”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're still pretty much involved. You need to tell the model how to use it. You need to tell the model the directions and the inputs you want to use. I think part of it is that perhaps most of people's experiences with AI over the last 12 months have been through chatbots. So the idea of AI has been condensed to this idea of chatbots. So if you have a chatbot, you have AI. And those things for me are summarizing a huge field into a very simple oversimplified concept. And so when you think about copyright and you think about creating things, I think for me all the way to steel is and like what are you making and you're so much in control? And these are not tools that will make things on your own. You are the one deciding how to make them in a way. And so you have to be responsible on how you use them. That's basically the point.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's part of how we analyze and how we work. We've worked with different studios and companies on understanding how to train the models for the needs that they have and what they want to do. Still, it's crucial for me to help everyone understand what these models are actually doing. Because a lot of the assumptions that we get around AI video is that you type in a prompt and you get a movie, right? And so if you're a studio, and this is actually true, I get now less often, but I used to get a lot of scripts in my inbox, in my email, where people were like, hey, I'm a producer or a writer. I've been working on this show. I have the whole script done. It's great. I heard you do AI videos. So here's the script, make my movie, right? And I've realized a lot of people thought that what AI video meant or AI pixel generation or making videos with AI meant was that you type in a prompt and you get entirely the entire movie that you thought you were going to get. And there is this that, no, it doesn't work like that. Like it will probably never work like that.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The flip side of this is those studios are also jealously protective of their IP. That's the thing that they monetize, right? They window it into different distribution channels, into different regions. They sue pirates who steal it on BitTorrent. You've trained on a lot of this content, right? Like there's reporting that Runway trained on a bunch of YouTube channels, including The Virgos, by the way. There's a trillion dollars. This is, in my mind, the single greatest threat, the already exorbitant cost structure of the AI industry is there's lawsuits everywhere that might say you have to pay all those creators. Have you thought about that risk?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And very good ideas can make amazing things. And we're seeing this already. The last Kydemare word for animation this year. I don't know if you've seen it. It's called a movie. It's a movie called Flow. Very small budget, I think less than like $10 million. And it was just a very good group of people working with great software. And they won the Academy Award against like $100 or $200 million productions. And it's just because you have very smart, talented people working with right software tools.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think that's the point. I think the last frontier of content, the last frontier was low quality content anyone can make. And I think that's TikTok and YouTube. Like there's billions of people out there making everything. The difference between that and like a high production studio is the quality of the content, the output, how good the output of the pixels on the videos is. And that for me is mostly a technical barrier. It's not a storytelling one. It's not a ideas one. It's like, yeah, making like a high-end science fiction movie, it's really expensive because you have to hire many people and work with this software that's very expensive. So the last frontier I would say for us, and I think many media companies I think about is like billions of people making high-end content. And that is the one that I think if you're in the traditional business of media and you haven't realized that, you're probably very scared because then you will compete with anyone, anyone in any part of the world with a small budget.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For all this investment. I think there will, many will. I mean, again, if you look about it from first principles, if you're in the business of ads or movie making, if you're in the business of movie making, you're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to make one movie. If I can take that process and help you do it for like a couple million, then all the delta, I can literally charge you for whatever delta I'm helping you improve there. And hopefully I can charge you way less so you can actually do more. If you expand that, then you're also not helping them, but you're expanding the window of who can do that thing in the first place. Because if you think about professional filmmaking, it's a very niche, like small industry, mostly because it's very expensive. Well, I have something that makes it cheaper, then I can expand their definition of who can get in the industry in the first place. And from a market perspective, that's great, because you had many more people who can do something that they never thought they could.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the justification comes from the value you see customers and the adoption that you see. I think that's the way you see AI in products go from like zero to many minutes of revenue like a couple of weeks, months, something that was unseen before. And it's because it just, it's such a different experience, it's such a different value that if you're ambitious about it, I think, yeah, it will definitely get there. And we're already seeing this. Still, like video for...”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“NVIDIA is an investor is like one of those things about AI industry, which is very funny, right? They're investing in the applications that drive the usage of their chips and all these places. And maybe some of them pay off and maybe they won't. That's the nature of investing. But at some point, everything has to add up to actually deliver a return for NVIDIA. Do you feel that pressure that this big runway has to be a big enough business to justify all of the infrastructure expense?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it's people who have seen this, and I think you want to provoke this, and you want to provoke, many of the things we're discussing now weren't that obvious 80 years ago until many people started to make the right bets on it. And I think, again, depending on where you are, it might be a good function to partner with people who get it and who want to work with you long term. And I think the people we work with and help us get to that point.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Google is an investor, so we work closely with them. Again, they're different functions of businesses. If you're a hyperscaler, you're probably in the business of optimizing things. You need to make things cheap and scalable for everyone. It's a different function from a research lab who is building these new things. And so again, Probably it's good to pair the two because you have a good research lab with an optimization, then there's transfer that you can make technology wise that will allow companies to just run on the things, sell it, and then get feedback about the company, this other part of the company is working on the next thing, which is where we are”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, again, on the expansion side, having the ability to expand that, having the ability to innovate on that, it's way harder. And then having the ability to just catch up and play optimization. Game is easier, and I think our bet is like, well, this is the advantage point where you can keep on moving things and just keeping pushing boundaries.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, if you tell them, here's the thing that works, optimize it, people will go very hard on it. And for some models that are two, three years old, now that's the case. They're very cheap to train from scratch. I think there are new models that are still on the expansion phase. We haven't figured out exactly how to optimize them. So, but we will. But I think that happens is the same thing as if you spend too much time optimizing them, the trade-off is going to stop working on the new expansion. And I think most companies these days are betting on expanding. So they're betting on paying more for the sake of expanding that and not falling behind rather than trying to optimize and reduce the cost of the thing that works.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the answer yes? If you have one, AI tends to move in two waves. There's an expansion wave and the optimization wave. Expansion is like, well, we're discovering what we could do. And if you think about the models from two or three years ago, yeah, they were expensive. Now, most of those models, you can train them on your laptop because models have gotten into a stage where you can optimize them and researchers. And there's one thing engineers love. It's optimizing things.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the big trends in the industry is the cost of every new model is getting exponentially higher. Sam Altman is like Tory in the capitals of the world, can I have a trillion dollars? And maybe he'll get, you never know. You might get it. Are you on the same cost curve where every new model is that much more expensive?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So here's the great example. That's a great distinction between verticals and principles. If you think about a vertical, then you'll choose a solution and you build towards that. If you think about a principle, you should assume that many of the things that you're trying to build on the product will eventually become futures of new models. So therefore, your product should be like many layers ahead if you want to spend time on it. And so the principle should be, for example, an image generation, zero shot. So zero shot means you don't have to do, if you want to model to do something, you don't have to train it. You need to just show it examples. Therefore, you can widely expand the range of things models can do if you have the right examples. So maybe a good idea would be find collect examples of things you can teach models for. And then it changes the way you can approach product. So I think that distinction between principles and verticals is relevant for that.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talking to Kevin Scott from Microsoft's CTO of Microsoft, and he's made the same point in a slightly different way. He said there's more capabilities in the models we have today than anyone knows what to do with. And to me, it's like, well, then we should start building products that make sense. But then the tension is, well, the next generation of models is just going to eat my product.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two weeks ago. And I'm not kidding. Every day I open our users and Twitter and Instagram and there's a new use case. Like now, just before coming here, someone was using it to basically for clothes so you can try on anything. You basically go to any shop online, any commerce site, put a photo of yourself and just see yourself wearing that in hyper-realistic manners. Like I just never thought you could do it for that and you can.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe, but I don't think we're close to that. Even if we stop now research, we decide collectively or industry-wide, let's stop research. I think there's like 10 years, 20 years of innovations that are just there, you know, latent, waiting for someone to discover them. I don't think we're at that point yet where you can say, hey, hey, this is enough. Because I think there's just too much space to grow and have models to think that we just released a model.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the thing we keep referring around, is this idea of a company company? We don't want to be a company company. A company company is a company that behaves like a company because that's the way companies behave, you know? And you're like, no, don't do that. Be a company that's focused on solving a problem or a research constraint or a user need. Don't focus on the things that are superficial that you're supposed to be doing because you're a company. And I get partnered about that because the moment you lose that and you get into that you're dead. You're going to stop innovating. You're going to focus on the wrong things to optimize for. And I think just culture, maybe reinforcing this to the team. I still interview everyone in the company. I'm still pretty much involved in how we make decisions on product. The moment you step back is probably the moment things are just, organizations tend to seek slow velocity if you're not constantly pushing them all the time.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make decisions, what kind of decisions? I think there are different decisions, they're decisions that are much more long term and irreversible decisions that are much more reversible. I think we're very much of the idea that, again, run experiments and be willing to understand if you're wrong in your assumptions. If you need to make a decision, like do it because it's like you're confident it will work. Change your mind. Sent this product decisions are coming from that taste component to it. I think overall taste has become a good way of directing the company, I would say, from how we operate on marketing and how we hire. I don't think there's one particular framework, but just the world idea of taste and intuition has become clear in how we make decisions.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We focus a lot on research and focusing on understanding what's coming and what's worth building. I think there's always a trade-off, specifically startups, where if you spend too much time working on the wrong thing, it might actually kill you. I think we listen to users, but sometimes users don't really know what they want. They know the problems really well, but they can articulate the exact solution for it. So you don't find yourself building exactly for where they're describing because they can't describe the thing that they don't know it's coming. And so it's, I don't know, I think it's like it's kind of like art, I guess. You become just really good at intuition and being like, okay, that thing, even if it could be a great deal now, like we're not going to do it right now. And so I think companies overall build intuition, and that's just experience of doing it enough times, and then saying no. You have to say no a lot of times. Customers come with great ideas, but just say no. Not because they don't, you don't think you can solve for them, but again, because it will trap you into the wrong thing for the wrong.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But right now, you're deciding what products to build, right? You're getting market feedback from users. You have studios using the tool. Agencies using the tool, you've got to make some decisions Where are we going to fill the gaps of the product and where are we going to wait? How do you make those decisions?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will be simulated. That's the principle we're operating. And therefore, you can go into many different products based on that idea. And so it's kind of the difference between choosing a vertical and choosing a principle in which you want to operate.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but I think that's more than just like the computer will talk to me. I think they're parts of how we'll talk to you and when it's the emotion. There's a lot of product that goes into research back. And I think no one really knows, to be honest, what the future product experience would look like because a lot of the interactions we're having, we just never thought we could have. And so you're only going to realize by having people use it. I think that happens a lot in research where researchers spend like so much time red teaming and doing all the work and then you put it out and in like two minutes just someone like figures out how to like use it in a completely different way. And actually that thing I think that's great. It points to the fact that I think the previous duration of software was based on this idea of you choose a vertical and just went there. I think the next generation of software is based on like you choose a principle of how you want to operate in the world and you build models towards that. Our principle is every pixel or more pixels that you will watch and consume will be generated.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Models. What happens a lot is that our customers are coming to us with specific questions like, hey, the model does this, but it doesn't do this. Can you build a specific product for that? And we could. We could build a product just for that, or we could wait for the next generation of models that would just do all of that on the fly. And so that's the tricky part because you're always trying to catch up, click catch up. And I think companies that understand research are much better positioned than just companies that are trying to catch up.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the connection of product and model helps the product team understand better what's coming. So you need to understand that the way TechS used to work was in much lower cycles of R&D. Now, research sent to moving like very far cycles. And so the issue with product, and I think product is one of the hardest things to do right now because you scope the kind of area of product that you work on, you design it, and you start building it, and by the time you build it, it's kind of opposite it. You've basically lost six months of work or whatever long it takes you. And so product needs to behave like a research organization. Like the way we tell a team is like, look, we have research scientists working on research, but everyone in the company is a scientist because everyone is running experiments. So before you spend too much time doing something, run an experiment. Build a simple prototype, like understand if it's worth it, and then check with research if the thing that you're working with, it's going to become useful or it's going to be there or it's going to actually not get submerged by the next generation.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the reasons I'm interested in asking that question, particularly of AI companies at your size, is there is the deep connection to the capabilities of the model and the research that's being done and the kinds of products you can build. I haven't seen a lot of great focused AI products. Runway actually might be one of them. But in the sort of broad case, there's ChatGPT, which is just sort of an open-ended interface to a frontier model. And then we're going to see what happens. Do you think that as you get bigger, the products will get more focused? Or do you think you still need the connection between the team building the model and the product teams themselves?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there's some org target in some way, but people, like we have a studio, like internal studio with creatives and producers and filmmakers working along research. And those people are sitting on the same table speaking the same language. And they come from different backgrounds, but they've managed to just collaborate together. And so, yeah, that's when you want to provoke.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's the best outcomes of research we've done have been about setting the right kind of boundaries, and then people let people go, let people work on its own and figure out on its own how to do it.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT