This week, I was granted access to a new interactive gaming experience that Runway plans to make available to everyone as soon as next week, according to CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela. The consumer-facing product is currently quite barebones, with a chat interface that supports only text and image generation, but Valenzuela says that generated video games are coming later this year. He says that Runway is also in talks with gaming companies about both using its technology and accessing their datasets for training.
Based on his recent conversations, Valenzuela believes the gaming industry is in a similar position to Hollywood when it was first introduced to generative AI. There was considerable resistance, but over time, AI has been gradually adopted in more areas of the production process. Valenzuela says Amazon’s recent show, House of David, was made in part with Runway’s technology, and that his company is working with “pretty much every major studio” and “most of the Fortune 100 companies.”
“If we can help a studio make a movie 40 percent faster, then we’re probably gonna be able to help developers of games make games faster,” he says. “They’re waking up, and they’re moving faster than I would say the studios were moving two years ago.”
Naturally, I couldn’t let Valenzuela get off our Zoom call without asking him about his recent acquisition talks with Zuckerberg: “I think we have more interesting intellectual challenges being independent, and remaining independent for now.”
