For example, it was used in producing the sequence in the film Everything Everywhere All At Once where two rocks with googly eyes had a conversation on a cliff, and it has also been used to make visual gags for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Whereas many competing startups were started by AI researchers or Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Runway was founded in 2018 by art students at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts—Cristóbal Valenzuela and Alejandro Matamala from Chilé, and Anastasis Germanidis from Greece.
It was one of the first companies to release a usable video-generation tool to the public, and its team also contributed in foundational ways to the Stable Diffusion model.
It is vastly outspent by competitors like OpenAI, but while most of its competitors have released general-purpose video-creation tools, Runway has sought an Adobe-like place in the industry. It has focused on marketing to creative professionals like designers and filmmakers and has implemented tools meant to make Runway a support tool to existing creative workflows.
The support tool argument (as opposed to a standalone creative product) helped Runway secure a deal with motion picture company Lionsgate, wherein Lionsgate allowed Runway to legally train its models on its library of films, and Runway provided bespoke tools for Lionsgate for use in production or post-production.
That said, Runway is, along with Midjourney and others, one of the subjects of a widely publicized intellectual property case brought by artists who claim the companies illegally trained their models on their work, so not all creatives are on board.
Apart from the announcement about the partnership with Lionsgate, Runway has never publicly shared what data is used to train its models. However, a report in 404 Media seemed to reveal that at least some of the training data included video scraped from the YouTube channels of popular influencers, film studios, and more.