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We had Cristóbal Valenzuela, the co-founder and CEO of Runway, which builds breathtakingly real AI media tools, including the incredible Gen-3 Alpha video foundation model on Unsupervised Learning. Cris sits at the intersection of technology and creativity, and in 2023 was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI. Runway is reported to be in talks to raise capital at a $4B valuation. Some highlights: 🎥 AI creative tooling is going to get a massive upgrade As amazing as AI video tools are right now, they’re soon going to be mind blowing. Think pixel-level precision, real-time generation, customizable controls to achieve a specific look and feel, and multi-modal inputs like using audio files to inspire video generation. Tasks that take droves of highly skilled workers countless hours to manually produce today are going to be available in new models soon. 💻 Building a better UI is a waste of time Cris believe that focusing too much on creating perfect user interfaces is a waste of time and resources. First, it distracts from the real mission of building better and more powerful models that have new capabilities. Second, in the future, interfaces may just dynamically generate themselves depending on the task at hand. You need different controls when creating a 2D animation vs a 3D movie, so why constrain users to a fixed UI, no matter how sophisticated, when AI models will soon be able to generate the controls they need on the fly? 🐝 Creative brainstorming is needed to get the best out of video AI These tools work best when humans push them to their limits. “One and done” prompts, or very fixed, rigid prompts, rarely generate great results. Cris himself was surprised one day when a creative journey he went on led to a “bee cam” — a first person shot zipping through blades of grass, as if a bee had a GoPro strapped to its head! 🔑 A big challenge is deciding what features to build now and what to hold back for improved models As with many technologies, there’s a tension between shipping new features for hungry users, vs. holding them back, knowing future models will handle the tasks in a much more satisfying way. Cris doesn’t want Runway to build tools that will rapidly become obsolete. His North Star is to focus on the direction of progress. That way even tools available today will be able to take advantage of more powerful models as they are released. Flexibility, in other words, is key. This was an awesome conversation that will give you a great sense of where video AI tools are today, and the amazing direction they are rapidly moving toward! Listen to our full episode below: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gza5qyaq Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3xWOqji Apple: https://apple.co/4cFhxa0