A Clearer Picture of OpenAI’s Next Battle
Well, look at that: We’ve broken ChatGPT.
A full week after OpenAI debuted an improved version of the bot with better image-making abilities, the tool has experienced a gigantic surge in demand and has at times been totally unavailable to use. (Sigh. I still haven’t gotten the darn thing to finish generating mocked-up images to inspire my slow-moving bedroom renovation. Sam—a little help, please!)
Now, if I could draw our attention away from all the Ghibli memes, another startup has also debuted a shiny new AI, and it points to the direction competition in the industry is heading in.
That spiffy AI belongs to Runway, a New York–based startup focused on generative video AI. It released a new version of its video-editing tool that makes it easier to construct longer, more sophisticated clips. A few days later, Runway formally announced what was a poorly kept secret: It had secured a gigantic new chunk of funding from General Atlantic and other investors, reportedly valuing it at $3 billion. And it publicly highlighted a new part of its operations that we spotlighted in a recent Big Read on Runway: The startup will begin financing filmmakers, hoping to deepen connections it has made in Hollywood.
Runway’s AI is rather obviously a significant step forward from what it offered before, and it seems pretty inevitable that OpenAI will shift to concentrating on videos in earnest given Runway’s very public advancements. (In December, OpenAI released its first version of its video-editing tool, Sora.) Runway hopes to capture a different market than OpenAI’s. It wants its tools used by professionals, while OpenAI targets a more general mass market. When Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela described the strategy in an interview for our earlier Big Read, I found myself nodding along: Yeah, they want to be the Adobe of AI—got it.
It seems like he’d have real room to maneuver away from OpenAI and establish his own territorial claim. Yet as this week has proven again, no AI company has proven to be better at capturing everyone’s attention than OpenAI, and I suspect it’s just a matter of time before OpenAI sets out to really squash the competition in video. (I wonder if concerns about that explain why Runway didn’t get the $4 billion valuation it initially wanted from its latest fundraising.) We’ll know that moment has fully arrived when Sora breaks down in public, too.—Abram Brown