Runway has spent the last seven years building visual generating tools for the creative industry. Now it sees a new opportunity for its technology: Robotics.
New York-based course is known for its video and photo generation AI World Models or Large Language Models that create a simulated version of the real world. Most recently, the company Gen-4, its video-generating model, in March and Runway Aleph, released its video editing model, in July.
As Runway’s World models began to improve-and become more realistically-started the company to receive in-depth interest from robotics and self-driving car companies that want to use the technique, Anastasis Germanidis, runway founder and CTO told TechCrunch in an interview.
“We believe that this ability to simulate the world is virtually useful beyond entertainment, although entertainment is an ever -increasing and large area for us,” said Germanidis. “It makes it much more scalable and cost -effective to train [robotic] Policies that interact with the real world, whether in robotics or in self -driving. “
Germanidis said that working with robotics and self -driving car companies was not something the runway originally imagined when it launched back in 2018. It wasn’t until the robotics and other companies in other industries reached that the company realized their models had much wider use cases than they initially thought, he said.
Robotics companies use Runway’s tech for training simulations, Germanidis said. He added that just training robots and self -driving cars in the real world scenarios are expensive for businesses, takes a long time and is hard to scale.
While the runway knows it will not replace the real world in any way, Germanidis said that companies can get a lot of value to run simulations on Runway’s models because they have the ability to become incredibly specific.
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Unlike in the real world, it makes it easier to test for specific variables and situations without changing anything else in the scenario, he added.
“You can take a step back and then simulate the effect of different actions,” he said. “If the car took this turn over this or performs this action, what will be the result of it? To create these rolls out of the same context, a really difficult thing to do in the physical world is to basically keep all the other aspects of the environment the same and test the effect of the specific action you will take.”
Banding track is not the only company that wants to tackle this. For example, Nvidia released the latest version of its Cosmos World models, in addition to other robotic training infrastructure, earlier this month.
The company does not expect to release a “completely separate line of models” for its robotics and self -driving car customers, Germanidis said. Instead, pave will fine -tune its existing models to better serve these industries. The company also builds a dedicated a robotic team.
Germanidis added that although these industries were not in the company’s original seats for investors, they are on board with this expansion. Runway has raised more than $ 500 million from investors such as NVIDIA, Google and General Atlantic for a $ 3 billion valuation.
“The way we think about the company is really built on a principle instead of being in the market,” said Germanidis. “This principle is this idea of ​​simulation, of being able to build a better and better representation of the world. Once you have the truly powerful models, you can use them for a wide variety of markets, a variety of industries. [The] Industries we expect are already there and they will change even more as a result of the power of generative models. “