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

“It's Verulin. Someone thought the other day that we were a thousand people, and I thought that that was the best compliment that you can give me. We're like 100, 100 people or so. It's very flat, very focused on autonomy more than anything else. And then very focused on what we do is less of objectives. We don't clearly don't believe in objectives. We have a way of working where we just set boundaries and where we want people to do research or explore. Because a lot of what we do has never been done before. And so if I tell you how to get there, I'm probably wrong because we've never done it. So it's research. You have to experiment and fail. And so what we do is we set their constraints with the boundaries and where we want you to experiment.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I can, it's we've been working, I've been obsessively working on this, and I would say over the last 12, 18 months, it's just like the models are going to a place where you can actually do very good things with it. I think there's always an optimization function that companies have to run, which is do you want to optimize for whatever is working now, or do you want to keep on growing? I think for us, it's like we really want to keep on growing. There's a lot of research we can invest on and a lot of areas of growth that we can keep on going. So I think the tension right now has always been like, do we want to optimize for this or what's next? I think we want to lean into what's next. I think there's a lot of things we haven't actually fully discovered that we could do that want to do.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, for businesses, yeah, we charge. I mean, students can pay. But also, they pay because it's useful. If it helps you do something, then sure, the value is worth it.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very simple. It's subscription. You just pay for the product and you get access to different parts of it. We have a free tier. So you can also just switch it for free. And then we work with schools. So there's course at NYU at the NYU Film School that teaches students how to use Runway. So instead of going to film school and giving you a camera, they give you runway. And so we're doing that with a few other schools as well. And so for all of those, we just give access for free.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like a greater fool maker, but it would have been great if I have the chance of telling the stories I had in my head. And if it was a technical barrier that prevented me from doing so, and now we have kids in every part of the world using runway and making those ideas, which I find just fascinating. It's great.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think quantity leads to quality. The more you make as an artist, the more you make, the better things you will do. Every artist, it's probably never draw once and be like, oh, sorry, I'm a master. Like Picasso painted hundreds of thousands of paintings. And many of you have never seen all of that. You just see the 1%. The same for musicians. People are there playing every single day until something until you hit something that actually works. And I think tools should be like that. They should be able to augment how you work so you can do more. And then you're the one choosing what you're doing. But like, look, I started the company away because I always wanted to make films. And I grabbed in Chile and I've never had the means of even buying a camera in the first place. I got my camera when I was like 27 years old. It was pretty late. And part of it was Xerxes. Like I couldn't afford ITobi software, which is very expensive back then. I think I probably wouldn't have become”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It becomes, I think, a component that we should consider because right now we're bounded by the way we're working and it's very slow and it's very constrained by all these processes. If you can augment that, then people can start doing more and more and more. I think that's great.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't think I fully agree with that. I think part of it is sometimes we overobsess around the process of how we make things. The goal of the screenwriter is to get the AVS that he wants in his mind or his world out there. And the most obvious ways you work with the set of technologies and tools around you, if you're able to do it faster, I think that's great. You can iterate on concepts faster. You can understand your ideas faster. You can collaborate with more people. You can make more. One of the biggest bottlenecks of media these days is that you have people working on one project for four years, three years, then you might actually work on it and the student might actually decide to kill it for many different reasons. So if you think about it, you spend your entire life four years of your life working on a thing that never saw the light of the day because it happened to be killed by whatever reason. And I think the idea would be, well, you don't have to work on one project. Hopefully you can work on many more. And so that's also the quantity aspect of.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually want to ask you about that because I know you think a lot about the creative industries and the active creativity. The counter argument to that is the gap between the screenwriter and the storyboard artist and the time it takes to communicate and translate is where the magic happens, right? And having the AI sort of collapse that into a mechanical process as opposed to a creative process actually reduces the quality of the creative. How do you feel about that?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shrinks the time the whole project gets developed and worked on. And so you have all these moments and gaps where AI can really just help you accelerate your own work, specifically in creative industries where still things are very manually done.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I was just with a call with the studio right before this, and we were going through a script that they wanted to test run with for. And the typical, I don't know if you guys have ever worked in film, but you develop the script. And once you get the script, the common thing to do next is like a storyboard. And so you basically take the storyboard and someone spends like a week or two weeks just drawing, this is for a scene or a couple of scenes, not for an entire film, but it's really expensive and time consuming. So when they were reading me through the script where they needed our help with our runway, I was on the side generating the storyboards on the fly. And by the time they finish, the storyboard was done. And so I think the first thing was they couldn't realize or fully understand what was going on because they never have work at that velocity speed. And for them, speed is also cost. If you have to compound the time it takes to make all of those servers by hand and they have the screenwriters doing it on real time, then it”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think Mark wants to call the administration. We should not say that. He's very aggressive human being. But the reason I ask that question that way is I see so many of these products and so many of these capabilities and they haven't yet connected to business results. Right. Like for a lot of companies, there was a study from IBM last month, maybe it's 25% of the AI investments they had seen in companies had returned on that investment. It's a low number, right? Everyone's trying stuff and figuring it out. I get it in advertising. I understand. Just a cost of acquisition of customer. Have you seen places in film studios and other places where just bringing the cost down is worth the investment?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make things, it's just going to be dramatically reduced. And that hole hopefully opens the door for many other folks to do this kind of work.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's a very appealing actually concept and world for many people who have never had the chance of doing ads in the first place. There's many businesses out there that just can't afford to buy an agency or work with an agency to get a production team to shoot like a AAA film or ad. And I think part of it is like, well, if you can actually help others do that, I think that's great. raises the bar for many because now anyone can do it. I think it's less about killing the ad agencies. I think that's a overall simplification. I think it's more about you'd reduce the time it takes to make something. The cost of making any piece of content will dramatically or hopefully go to the cost of inference. And so if you're good at making things conceptualizing ideas, you're going to have systems that can aid you at generating whatever you need. But you still do have a good idea, right? And so you still will have agencies. You still have talent and creatives, but perhaps the time it takes to”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't even have to do anything. Just come to us and tell me how many customers you want and like maybe some ideas about what your product is. And I'll generate video advertising and I'll stick it in the feeds and I'll just, you just watch the money roll in. This is a very Mark Zuckerberg way of thinking. But like that is like the first big market, right? Where you see, okay, we're going to bring the cost of making the ads down and that will result in some return. Is that where the demand is coming in for you as well?”
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 that I see the big platform companies so invested in video generation in particular is they're pointed at the advertising industry. You mentioned the advertising clients. Mark Zuckerberg, it's not even subtle anymore. He's like, I'm going to kill the advertising industry. He just says it out loud. I think he says it at Stripe Sessions a couple weeks ago or last week. And his pitch is like,”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ball direction is slightly off, and I'm like, great, that's a great piece of feedback because I will solve it, but also you don't realize that a year ago you just didn't thought this was possible.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we started, you couldn't. That's a thing. The first thing we ever did was a text to image model where images of 256 pixels wide. And they were like, if you've ever seen a Matt Rotko painting, like very abstract, that's the closest it could get. So if you wanted to render a face or a house or whatever, it was in the range of color, but it was very off. And so we went from that pixelated very low res image to 4K content of like 20 seconds long, of very sophisticated movement and actions. And so I think it's the realization that at that time, video was not even the scope of what you could think possible. And then over time, it became really feasible. And now I think we kind of joined, we've consistently moved in the goalpost, where the feedback we get from runaway is like, great, Chris, you can generate, I don't know, that bouncing ball in Mars. But you know, in Frank 27, like the”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So scale, that's one of the main things I think we've realized as an industry that scale matters. That's, I guess, the lesson that we've seen over time is that if you just scale compute, then model tend to work really well. I think we're all, yeah, at the beginning, it wasn't that obvious. And I think it became more obvious over the last couple of years. And then more copy, yeah, definitely helps. But more compute and more data and also better algorithms. So it's not just one single ingredient. It's not just if you get more compute, suddenly things get better. I think it's a combination of different”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From now on to the future, we'll start using AKA models to learn. But I think that has jumped. And then competition, of course, like now everyone is paying attention to this. When we started, there was really no one trying to help. If you had this same conversation eight years ago when I told you we're going to have AI models that can render video in hyperrealistic ways, people thought we were crazy. And now it's like an obvious direction. And there's a lot of people also trying to solve that same problem.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot has changed. I think we started the company in 2017, 2018. And yeah, ML was the way we referenced the field, I guess, of AI broadly. I think a few things have changed, first of all. Models have gotten really good. I mean, it's obvious for everyone. I hope everyone here has used an A model by now. I'm assuming that has happened. Seven years ago, no one was. I think consistency, quality, just overall outputs of models across the board are getting really good. And that's just changed people's experiences with AI. The second thing I think has become more real is that the value and how useful models are is becoming more evident to many people. And a couple of years ago, it was more like theoretical of how it could potentially be used. There's still many avenues where we don't entirely know how it will change things. We just know it well. And in some others, it already has changed many things, like learning, education. It's like it's pretty clear that pretty much I think every student out there.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were joking earlier that the URL is runway ml because that's what people were calling it machine learning before. What's changed since the boom in that approach? Have you had to rethink, okay, everyone understands what training model is now in the market for GPUs is more expensive? Like, where are the changes?”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lawsuit over the use of artistic works to train AI. Last year it was revealed that Runway had trained on huge spots of copyrighted YouTube material, including the purchase on a YouTube channel. So I asked Chris as plainly as I could whether in fact Runway had in fact trained on YouTube and how the industry might survive a world where all of these companies are made to pay substantial amounts of money to creators if even one of these big AI copyright lawsuits doesn't break their way. I think you'll find our back and forth in this to be pretty candid. And Chris articulated some of his own defenses for how the EI industry has approached this topic and what might happen next. It's Dakota, so we of course also talked about runway structure. Chris has a lot to say about how runway functions as a research lab and the tension that exists between releasing and refining real products and putting them in the hands of professionals while at the same time working on new models and tools that might make the current technology obsolete. One quick note before we start, Dakota is planning for the future and we want to hear from you to figure out how we can make our show better. You can visit voxmedia.com slash survey to”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Primitive the technology was back then compared to now. That said, the AI hype really is out of control, and runway is on the same collision course with creators, artists, and copyright law as every other part of the AI industry. Here, Chris and I really get into all that here. One theme you'll hear Chris come back to again and again in this conversation is that he doesn't see runway as a disruptive outsider to filmmaking, but rather an active participant in the art. He sees runway as a tool that will bring filmmaking and other forms of artistic expression to many more people, not as an apocalyptic force that will hit Hollywood like a wrecking ball. You'll hear him say they're working with many of the biggest movie studios today. Runway has already struck a deal with Lionsgate, and just this week, the company made another deal with AMC Networks. In that announcement, Chris said that embracing AI video generation would be, quote, a make or break moment for every entertainment company. But cozying up to Hollywood doesn't mean runways off the hook in the AI versus art debate. And in fact, runway itself is part of an ongoing class action.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Dakota. I'm Neil Lapatelle, editor in chief of the Virge, and Dakota is my show about Big Ideas and Other Problems. Today I'm talking with Runway CEO and co-founder Chris Valenzuela. This one's special. Chris and I were live at an event in New York City last month hosted by Alex Partners, so you'll hear the audience in the background. Runway is one of the leading AI video generation platforms, the basic concept is familiar by now. You start with a reference image, either something you've created using Runway's own model or something you upload, you type in a prompt, and Runway spits out a fully formed video sequence. What's most interesting to me about Runway is that while AI hype is at a fever pitch right now, there's a little more depth to the company. Chris founded Runway back in 2018, so he's been through some boom and bust periods in AI, and you'll hear that experience come through as we talk about the technology and what it can and can't do. Back when Chris began to more seriously explore AI video generation as a researcher at New York University, we still mostly referred to AI as machine learning. And you'll hear Chris recount how”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 month plan required, $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 GB is busy.”
2025-06-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela thinks AI filmmaking is the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT