Michelle Kwon 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.
Michelle Kwon retweeted
When everything you can imagine can become reality, the only failure is a failure to imagine.
Michelle Kwon retweeted
Today, Runway is joining the OpenAI marketplace as a launch partner. 🔥
We're joining the @OpenAI Marketplace as a launch partner.
Starting today, you can access the best image, video, audio and editing models, and apply part of your OpenAI commitment toward purchases with Runway.
Learn more and start creating at the link below.
Michelle Kwon retweeted
GPT-Image 2.5 is live on Runway 🔥
As our very own @umpherj mentioned in the @OpenAI blog post, we think its a great model 😀
Michelle Kwon retweeted
Can answer them one by one:
- somebody made this in runway?
Yes, just one person only using Runway.
- Who is this wizard?
You can chat and find him here: runway.com/careers
- Can I do this?
Yes, of course. Here is how: teapaw.org/runwayml/status/209339…
- Is runway that much better than it was 1 year ago!?
Runway is that much better than it was 24 hours ago. Daily improvements. We are by far the most-used platform for media generation.
- is there a tutorial?
Yes here teapaw.org/runwayml/status/209339…
- I HAVE QUESTIONS
I HAVE ANSWERS
EXAMPLE RESPONSE:
SHOT 1 — Click.
Start on a shot of the man (Manny) in the Dominican jersey, who lifts his arm and snaps his fingers on one hand.
SHOT 2 — Payoff.
Cut to a shot of the other man (Malik) in the yellow top and glasses, whose outfit instantly turns into a suit made out of raw steaks. He looks to his left and there's a Bengal tiger approaching him. He begins sprinting away yelling "Not cool, bro!"
Michelle Kwon retweeted
Runway is officially coming to LATAM. Last month, we visited our customers in Brazil, and now it’s Chile 🇨🇱 We’re meeting with some of the most important companies and customers in Chile and also with @GobiernodeChile. We also have a few community events, so if you’re there, make sure to join us.
LATAM is becoming an incredibly important user base for Runway. We’re already in Japan, France, and the UK, and we’ll continue our global expansion to make sure Runway reaches every corner of the world.
Dos chilenos de vuelta a su país @matamalaortiz
Michelle Kwon retweeted
What’s coming from Runway might be among the most consequential releases we’ve ever made. The team is working on so many exciting things, pretty excited and can’t wait for you all to see what’s coming over the next few weeks and months.
Michelle Kwon retweeted
The Coachella of robotics, world models, and physical AI is Runway’s SF Summit, coming to the Bay Area on September 30.
Speaker lineup:
@QuanVng from @physical_int, @liu_mingyu from @nvidia, @robertnishihara from @anyscalecompute, @pariljain from @thebotcompany, and @jon_barron from @GoogleDeepMind, @agermanidis from @runwayml, @Vivek_Vis from @CAGovernor, Richard Ahlfeld from @CoreWeave and more to be announced..
We’ll also have some unexpected surprises
Tickets here: summit.runwayml.com/
Michelle Kwon retweeted
New favorite, wowzers @runwayml
If you thought your Lenny's Newsletter subscription couldn’t get any better, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Today, I’m adding 11 more incredible products to Lenny’s Product Pass:
1. @RunwayML
2. @WakingUp
3. @Higgsfield
4. @BrainFMapp
5. @Mercury (Personal)
6. @Resend
7. @CustomerIO
8. @Pangram
9. @Readwise
10. @Jamdotdev
11. @Supercut_video
Get all of these products free for an entire year with your Lenny's Newsletter subscription*.
This brings the Product Pass to 34 (!!!) beloved, premium products—including a full year free of @Cursor_ai, @ElevenLabs, @WisprFlow, @Replit, @Lovable, @FactoryAI, @Linear, and more.
This is over $40,000 in value for Insiders ($400/year), and over $36,000 for Annual subscribers ($200/year).
You might think this is too good to be true, but it's not.
If you are already an Annual or Insider subscriber, grab your codes here: lennysproductpass.com/
If you are currently free or monthly, upgrade to unlock the Product Pass immediately: lennysnewsletter.com/subscri…
Read the full announcement here: lennysnewsletter.com/p/produ…
* Some products are available exclusively for Insider-tier subscribers, including Runway, Higgsfield, Mercury Personal, Pangram, Replit, Cursor, ElevenLabs, and Lovable.
Michelle Kwon retweeted
This is a big update that I’m excited to finally share. We launched our first dev platform for AI media in 2020, offering a simple API and a diverse set of models. Back then, we built a powerful SDK and inference engine to power those models. Many of those learnings were eventually applied to training our first generation of image and video models after 2020. Now, we’re taking everything we’ve learned from six years of building an insanely powerful inference engine and infrastructure to deploy models at scale and making it accessible to everyone, with much more on top.
That includes zero-day releases of the best AI media models (Seedance, Runway, NBP and more), pre-built endpoints for specific outcomes, workflows as APIs, and real-time characters. Runway inference is here for everyone.
Today, we're launching Runway Dev, a new AI media platform for professional developers and enterprise teams.
From search and advertising to ecommerce and gaming, developers are using Runway to cut costs, iterate faster and drive better consumer engagement. Runway Dev gives teams building generative media experiences a single platform from one vendor, removing the need to stitch together a dozen disparate APIs on their own.
Learn more at the link below.
Michelle Kwon retweeted
Video models are hard. Real-time video models are even harder.
Loved this breakdown by @itunpredictable on how we productionized Runway Characters, our real-time interactive avatar model.
We had to figure out a lot of things like causal training, lipsyncing, parallelizing the VAE and pinning the KV cache so CUDA graphs don't break.
One of the most cracked, under the radar research teams is at @runwayml.
They were on the OG Stable Diffusion paper and just released the first autoregressive video model.
Did a technical deep dive on this + some interesting inference optimizations:
amplifypartners.com/blog-pos…
Michelle Kwon retweeted
New on the Runway API: Recipes.
Drop production-ready generative media features into your platform, with one API call. Recipes are Runway-built endpoints with our prompting and workflow expertise packaged in. Polished results, without building or maintaining the workflow yourself. Create product ads from an image, swap a product in an existing video and more. At scale.
Michelle Kwon retweeted
As the biggest AI lab established in New York, the only rational thing we could do is change our logo for this week.
🤖 Made with AI
Michelle Kwon retweeted
So much talent in London and across Europe. Proud of @runwayml’s commitment to expand in the region, and this is just the beginning.
Runway 🤝 London.
Nvidia-backed $5 billion AI company tells CNBC it's launching major expansion in London cnbc.com/2026/06/01/nvidia-b…
Michelle Kwon retweeted
Less than a year ago, we introduced Aleph 1.0, with the thesis that video models can become as general as language models. It was the first model of its kind, moving beyond rigid tasks like text-to-video or image-to-video, to accept combinations of image, video, and text inputs and generalize to tasks unseen during training.
Today, we're releasing Aleph 2.0, with the goal of making video editing models as powerful as possible for real-world use cases. It generates up to 30 seconds of video at 1080p and propagates edits consistently across shots. It preserves the details of the original video extremely well.
Based on all the learnings from 1.0, we've gotten more opinionated about what the right interface for a video editing model looks like. You can now preview edits on a single frame before generating the entire video, which makes for a much more interactive and controllable editing experience.
Hope you have as much fun with it as we've had these past weeks.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Michelle Kwon retweeted
One of our enterprise customers, a large insurance company, told us they achieved a 99% reduction in reshoot costs using Runway ($7 in Runway credits vs. $ 10K+ for a typical reshoot).
They needed to change a single word in a VO to localize a US commercial for Canada, and used Runway for lip sync and audio generation instead of organizing a reshoot. Verbatim feedback:
“You can’t even put a price on the speed to market.”
Expect a lot more 99% cost reduction stories to come up soon.
Michelle Kwon retweeted
We are actively looking into reports on quality, queues and new errors related to Seedance 2.0 and are working closely with Bytedance to get things back to normal.
Michelle Kwon retweeted
There were a lot of takeaways from the Runway conference yesterday. But the one that has stayed with me most is the level of impact this company has had on people’s lives around the world.
Having close to a thousand of your best users and customers together in the same physical space is something pretty surreal and unique in so many great ways. It makes the most abstract things feel very real. Whenever I could, I wandered around the main area and talked to people who had flown in from Spain, Sweden, Mexico, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and so many other places just to be there for one day.
People came up to tell me how using Gen-1 back then changed their lives. How Runway reshaped the way they work. How they found a new job. How it helped them reconnect with a dormant passion. Or simply how it made them happy. People whose lives were changed in ways both practical and deeply personal because something we built reached them at the right moment. The greatest fuel a team can have. It reminds you what all the work is for. It gives you energy to keep building, to keep pushing. To be reminded, in such a direct way, that the work matters. To be able to measure the number of lives you have changed for the better.
Michelle Kwon retweeted
Excited to be partnering with great founders pushing the frontier of AI, whether that's research, infrastructure, applications, or entirely new kinds of media.
If that's where you're building, we want to hear from you.
Today we're also introducing the Runway Fund, an investment vehicle dedicated to backing the next generation of companies building across AI, media and world simulation. For the past several years, we've been investing quietly with this fund, backing a range of companies, including @cartesia, @lancedb and @tamarindbio.
