AI company Runway has announced what it calls its first world model, GWM-1. It’s a significant step in a new direction for a company that has made its name primarily on video generation, and it’s part of a wider gold rush to build a new frontier of models as large language models and image and video generation move into a refinement phase, no longer an untapped frontier.

GWM-1 is a blanket term for a trio of autoregression models, each built on top Runway’s Gen-4.5 text-to-video generation model and then post-trained with domain-specific data for different kinds of applications. Here’s what each does.

GWM Worlds

GWM Worlds offers an interface for digital environment exploration with real-time user input that affects the generation of coming frames, which Runway suggests can remain consistent and coherent “across long sequences of movement.”

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Runway debuts a physics-aware world model that simulates reality to train agents and power video, robotics, and avatar applications.

In 2016, the legendary Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki was shown a bizarre AI-generated video of a misshapen human body crawling across a floor.

Miyazaki declared himself “utterly disgusted” by the technology demo, which he considered an “insult to life itself.”

“If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it,” Miyazaki said. “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.”

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