[HN Gopher] Runway Gen-4
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       Runway Gen-4
        
       Author : meetpateltech
       Score  : 69 points
       Date   : 2025-03-31 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (runwayml.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (runwayml.com)
        
       | xnx wrote:
       | Runway is pretty far down on this leaderboard (Google Veo 2 is on
       | top): https://huggingface.co/spaces/ArtificialAnalysis/Video-
       | Gener...
       | 
       | Hopefully Gen-4 can improve.
        
         | jejeyyy77 wrote:
         | what are these leaderboards even measuring
        
           | leumon wrote:
           | elo ranking based on user preferences. you can vote on
           | prompts and submit new ones in the 'video arena' tab
        
       | vessenes wrote:
       | So, these demos look outstanding, far better than Wan-2.1 which
       | is the current open weights leader in the video generation
       | community.
       | 
       | I'm particularly interested in their claim that they're improving
       | on real world physics and understanding, sort of a JEPA-
       | reminiscent claim. Nothing about their model, training, infra in
       | the announcement.
       | 
       | I've never used Runway, but their pitch and partners (Lionsgate,
       | for instance) tell me they're working on making a tool for
       | industry pros --- this already looks to me like it will be useful
       | if it integrates well with existing tools.
       | 
       | One of the most interesting shots they showed was an infill based
       | on sketch; they had an image of a misty farm area, and a sketch
       | of a farmhouse, they showed the farmhouse rendered in, then the
       | same house on fire, then what looked like maybe a color grading
       | step. I'm curious to play with this and see how good it is.
       | 
       | *UPDATE* I just paid for a monthly standard subscription to try
       | it out, and .. couldn't figure out how to get access to it at
       | all. I can say that Runway 3 ML Turbo gives real nightmare fuel
       | on cel-shaded source images in I2V use cases though. Waiting to
       | see if I get my refund or access.
        
         | bastawhiz wrote:
         | Hey vessenes, Gen-4 is still being rolled out. Stay tuned.
        
           | vessenes wrote:
           | Hey Basta, cool. You should note that in your payment page
           | which says if people pay they get access.
        
         | whywhywhywhy wrote:
         | > improving on real world physics and understanding
         | 
         | Can't help but flashback to when Sora was first previewed and
         | the hype crew were claiming it was a world physics engine and
         | now when it finally shipped months and months later no one uses
         | it and it didn't deliver on any of the hype at all.
        
           | torginus wrote:
           | I wonder if it would be possible to create an AI image/video
           | editor very much like blender or photoshop - where you get to
           | drag objects around, perhaps based on a transformer(?) model,
           | where each token(s) encode an object similarly how a 3D game
           | engine encodes a game object - like latent vectors matrix
           | rows that correspond to position in world space, size,
           | texture, etc.
           | 
           | The 'renderer' would be a neural net that would take this
           | soup of tokens, and resolve it to a 2d frame.
           | 
           | The underlying logic engine would be a human one - or perhaps
           | a traditional video game engine, that emits the tokens from
           | which the context can be built up and decoded into an image.
        
           | danielbln wrote:
           | No-one uses it because there are better and cheaper and
           | faster and more open models out there. Had they released it
           | right after the announcement they could have surfed the hype
           | wave. And of course do these models simulate the world to
           | some degree, they have to. It's not a universe simulator to
           | be sure, but stuff like gravity, momentum, etc. is kind of
           | inferred,
        
             | echelon wrote:
             | Kling, Hailuo Minimax, and Google Veo are the best tools.
             | Kling is the leader by an extremely wide margin.
             | 
             | Wan video is a brand new open weights model that is
             | developing a nice research and tooling ecosystem around it.
             | Netflix has been playing with it. Further research and
             | tooling will be built on top of it for sure.
             | 
             | Sora is garbage (currently) and Runway, Luma, and Pika are
             | mid. Pika kind of left the race to focus on social media
             | content and memes.
             | 
             | There are a bunch of other stealth / research foundation
             | models that will be rolling out soon. It's a hyper
             | competitive market and consumers are going to win.
        
         | echelon wrote:
         | This is still nowhere near as good as Kling or Veo. And word is
         | that Sora's next release is mind-blowing.
         | 
         | > far better than Wan-2.1 which is the current open weights
         | leader
         | 
         | Open models still have tremendous value. You aren't censored or
         | controlled with Wan-2.1, and censorship is more annoying than
         | you might think. We've been making a zombie film and even
         | prompts that relate to blood and gore can get censored.
         | Furthermore, you can plug Wan into into open source tools and
         | workflows for enhanced controllability. Wan literally just
         | launched a month ago (Wan 2 was the first release), so it's a
         | really unfair assessment.
         | 
         | I think Runway as a company is dead in the water. They raised
         | way too much money, and there are a billion competitors with
         | similar shaped products. They'll probably wind up getting
         | quietly acquihired under their valuation. The video models are
         | hugely fungible.
         | 
         | > I've never used Runway, but their pitch and partners
         | (Lionsgate, for instance) tell me they're working on making a
         | tool for industry pros
         | 
         | They don't have industry partnerships beyond Lionsgate. It's
         | [redacted] that is selling to Disney and the tier-1 studios,
         | not Runway. You'll hear more news relating to some of their
         | live action films soon. I know those folks are on this forum.
         | 
         | In any case, the floodgate of major studios using AI is about
         | to open. I'm more excited about the independent professionals,
         | though. That's where the hyper-local and niche creativity lies.
        
         | pacomerh wrote:
         | I paid for a month worth of credits to try it out, not this
         | version but the previous and I depleted the credits really
         | really fast, you really need to keep iterating a lot to get a
         | good result tbh. You can see these generated clips here:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpE-8scsOy0
        
       | accrual wrote:
       | Pretty impressive. I watched "The Retrieval". It gave me slight
       | Scavengers Reign vibes, maybe inspired by it. There are still
       | some minor/subtle artifacts that give it away as an AI
       | generation, but still totally watchable and enjoyable.
       | 
       | I suspect we'll see some fully AI generated feature length films
       | in the future. There will be all sorts of discourse about it, but
       | IMO at the end of the day, it's just another tool for expression.
        
       | torginus wrote:
       | This looks really pretty and the website hints at professional
       | use, but I'd like to ask anyone who works in the media industry -
       | is this model good enough, or convenient enough to fit into the
       | production pipeline of professional video editors or will this be
       | another novelty model used to generate memes and stuff?
        
         | echelon wrote:
         | Industry chose another video gen company, one which has been
         | super busy making deals with the top studios.
         | 
         | edit: I removed the name of the company, but their folks are
         | definitely in this forum.
        
           | postsantum wrote:
           | Why? Do share, please
        
             | echelon wrote:
             | It may or may not be a YC company. They have a really good
             | video model.
        
       | vunderba wrote:
       | Lots of quick cuts on the longer movies. Good quality but I can't
       | find any details on perhaps one of the most important questions,
       | which is what's the maximum duration for either T2V or I2V? I
       | have yet to see any decent cohesive generators beyond roughly 10
       | seconds.
        
       | genevra wrote:
       | I'm shortening my time-line to 10 years before we can watch fully
       | generated in real time movies about our preferred prompt.
        
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