Soon, everyone will have access to their own world simulator. This will be the most important technological development of our time.
Video models trained at sufficient scale become world models. To predict the next frame, a video model must learn how the world works. How objects move, how forces propagate, how actions cause effects. General world models are learned approximators of physics.
The hardest problems facing humanity are rooted in physical reality. Robotics, medicine, climate, materials, energy. Language models will not get us there. Text distills existing human knowledge. In order to move beyond that, we need to learn directly from raw observations of the world.
Universal simulation is fundamentally about access. Experiences limited by geography and cost will become available to anyone. Running experiments today requires equipment, funding, and institutional access. With world simulators, the tools of discovery stop being scarce. Small teams will be able to develop autonomous systems and test policies across millions of scenarios without physical infrastructure. A student anywhere in the world will have her own biology lab and her own particle accelerator.
Progress will not happen overnight, but it will happen faster than people expect. We anticipate half a decade before we achieve human-scale world simulation: interactive simulations indistinguishable from the real world. Within a decade, we expect to simulate physics and biology accurately enough to solve a significant percentage of today's scientific challenges.
At Runway, we choose to invest in this long-term research vision rather than short-term optimization. At the same time, we will be deploying world models incrementally: this is how the world comes to understand what they are capable of, and how we learn to build them responsibly.
Science is about understanding reality. Art is about transcending it. These are two expressions of the same capability, which is why we need to advance them together. Runway will always operate at their intersection.