fix the money, fix the world
Joined April 2009
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UncleSats retweeted
Runway turned eight years old this week. We started at a time when generative models were a research curiosity, and had to figure out how to run an AI company from first principles. Growing this organization has been one of the biggest joys of my life.
Below is a short note that I sent the team:
Thank you for the kind words, everyone. The reality is, as convenient as it might be to portray otherwise, the Runway of today looks nothing like the Runway of 2018. And that's by design. We didn't know we'd be focusing on video, let alone pretraining video models at scale, let alone pursuing world models. It's a convention to rewrite the origin story to fit the present. But this company is all about breaking conventions, so let's do away with that one too, shall we?
So then, what is Runway about? I think Runway is a story about betting on people. By far the most gratifying moments of my time here have been watching people get an opportunity and then prove themselves far beyond what anyone expected.
The person with zero publications who became one of the most important researchers in the community. The person who barely spoke in meetings and became one of the best managers in the company. You know who you are.
And it's the three of us too: Alejandro, Cris, and me. Three people from an art school with zero connections should not have built a company that made it this far. It wasn't supposed to happen. It did because we got lucky with the people we brought on.
I desperately want the story and legacy of this company to be about how good people win. In the world we live in, the default is that the loudest people win, no matter how wrong they are. We've beaten many loud-but-wrong competitors, but we can't take that for granted. The odds favor the loud over the right, because loudness is noticed immediately and being right takes time to be noticed.
So when you know you are right, please be louder than you think you should be, even when it feels uncomfortable. The world will be better for it. And let's all make the ninth year of Runway the loudest one yet.
UncleSats retweeted
So, basically, 500 million Europeans expect 300 million Americans to protect them from 120 million Russians who can’t even defeat 40 million Ukrainians while those 500 million Europeans don’t even realize they are being conquered by 2 billion Muslims who claim they are being persecuted by 8 million Israelis. Is that about right?
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This needs to be shared:
forbes.com/sites/rashishriva…
UncleSats retweeted
@higgsfield_ai sent us a cease and desist last night, asking us to shut down our Open Source Higgsfield challenge.
Our read on why they sent it. When the apps people pay for can be rebuilt in the open in two weeks, that’s an uncomfortable thing for a closed platform to watch.
So here’s us reiterating our promise to every builder in the challenge and community, and we’re keeping it:
• The challenge stays open
• Final submissions close tomorrow, Oct 30
• Winners are announced Nov 6, with prizes paid as promised
You showed up for each other. We’re showing up for you.
If we win, we all win!
Comfy out 🫡
Last night, @higgsfield sent @ComfyUI a cease and desist (attached)
They want the Open Source Higgsfield challenge taken down within 48 hours.
Their argument is that our use of the Higgsfield name and that using their CEO's likeness is an infringement violation (man, the irony). Claiming that it makes the event look like Higgsfield is associated with it.
This couldn't be farther from the truth, which is that Higgsfield made a promise to open source its product and never did.
For the past two weeks, builders have been recreating popular closed apps as open workflows anyone can run.
So we asked our community to deliver where Higgsfield failed: apps in the open, built by the community, for the community. We've made it clear that the challenge is organized by ComfyUI and not affiliated with or endorsed by Higgsfield.
When we started Comfy, we made the community a promise. Our product stays open, free, and yours. We’ve kept it every day since, and one letter isn’t going to change that.
The challenge stays up. Comfy and open source will win!
UncleSats retweeted
Good evening.
To everyone reading about the $5.9 billion Binance hack and declaring cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin dead, two things:
1) Bitcoin itself was not hacked, an exchange managing cryptocurrency wallets and holding the keys was hacked.
2) Former CEO CZ says that he expects Binance to fully cover the losses with their $144B balance sheet.
This event in no way shape or form exposed or impaired the Bitcoin network.
Have a great night.
UncleSats retweeted
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s irresponsible to not own bitcoin.
First, companies will say, “We accept bitcoin.”
Then, they’ll say, “We only accept bitcoin.”
Then people will not value dollars or fiat, and there will be a run on the banks.
Eventually, the world will never be the same.
The individuals and companies that are ready for the seismic shift will come out ahead.
Those that are left holding legacy currency will not.
UncleSats retweeted
The loudest opponents of Bitcoin seem to be those who either missed it, dismissed it, or sold it early, and each of them appear to be driven by nothing more than painful regret.
UncleSats retweeted
Here's an app I made in App Studio called Image Blender, which allows you to combine various images together, choose the attributes you like about them and generate new images from the blend. It's super fun. Give it a try 👇
image-blender--rw.runway.stu…
UncleSats retweeted
I’ve been playing with App Studio for almost half a year now, and these days most of Runway’s internal tools are built in-house. That includes our own video-optimised Figma clone, character creation engines and fully functional synthesisers. It also includes this location scouting app, which generates satellite imagery, builds a 3D model of the landscape and lets you capture location shots that get saved across the whole map for cross-referencing.
With App Studio you can build whatever you want, for whatever you need, on state-of-the-art architecture, security and compatibility.
Oh, and this video? I made it with another app I built in App Studio.
UncleSats retweeted
Runway App Studio is now live. One of our most exciting and anticipated releases.
We started building this internally for our team to use, and within just a few weeks, it was seeing incredible usage. The only reasonable thing to do was to release it to the world.
I strongly believe that most of the interfaces we use to control models will be specific to each individual. Not many-to-one, but one-to-one. Any form of control you can imagine. Any version of Runway you want.
UncleSats retweeted
it might sound woo woo, but radiating positive energy is the closest thing to magic i've found. tip generously, compliment strangers, share your knowledge with no expectation of anything in return. give like you have more than enough, and eventually you’ll find that you do.
UncleSats retweeted
Man, Higgsfield has got to be the absolute shadiest company in all of AI. It's absolutely astonishing.
UncleSats retweeted
What I Talk About When I Talk About Control
Making something and having the skill to make it used to feel tightly linked. Now the outcome no longer proves you have the skill. Or does it?
When text-to-video first started working, that’s what it felt like. All you had to do was type in a short text description, press a button, and voila. It was magic or cheating, depending on how you looked at it. The fact that it worked at all was a breakthrough, but it also didn’t look like the person making the thing had done very much. We’d created something like auto mode for generative video, and “auto” isn’t a word we associate with craft. Yes, prompting is a skill, but being a better “describer” of the thing you want to make isn’t something we’ve historically been satisfied with as skill, unless your craft itself was flowery prose.
As the models get more capable, the makers want more degrees of freedom to try things. New places to make choices become new places to exercise judgment, and enough judgment creates the possibility of craft. Creators start developing intuitions about the models, just like people have developed intuitions about cameras, editing software, or any other medium.
New capabilities show up before we can understand them. So we build whatever interface we can manage to. Minimum viable control and minimum interfaces to get started. That becomes the first auto mode for that new tool. Then people use it, push it against its limits, and give us pretty loud hints at what they want to be able to do next. It takes time to figure out which new primitives are powerful, and where users want more control.
People want more control. And they want more degrees of freedom. I believe that part of what makes models more controllable is that they become personal. AI is fundamentally a general purpose technology that can be shaped in any unique way you want. Models are generalization machines that can adapt to what you need. Everyone has a different way of using models. Different ways of finding them useful and productive.
I strongly believe that most of the interfaces we use to control models will be individual-specific instead of general. Not many to one, but one to one. Any form of control you can imagine. Any version of Runway you want. Soon.