Runway, a video generation start-up that has deals with Hollywood studios, including Lionsgate, launched a product last month that uses world models to create gaming settings, with personalized stories and characters generated in real time.
“Traditional video methods [are a] brute-force approach to pixel generation, where you’re trying to squeeze motion in a couple of frames to create the illusion of movement, but the model actually doesn’t really know or reason about what’s going on in that scene,” said Cristóbal Valenzuela, chief executive officer at Runway.
Previous video-generation models had physics that were unlike the real world, he added, which general-purpose world model systems help to address.
To build these models, companies need to collect a huge amount of physical data about the world.
San Francisco-based Niantic has mapped 10 million locations, gathering information through games including Pokémon Go, which has 30 million monthly players interacting with a global map.
