For the past several years, the AI industry has largely operated on the premise that intelligence lives in language. Large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude reflect that bet.

Runway, alongside other competitors, is making a different one. Its founders believe the next form of AI intelligence won’t be built from text, but from video and world models that learn how the world works, not just how humans describe it. That distinction sounds academic. Its implications are not.

Runway co-founder and co-CEO Anastasis Germanidis said training models directly on observational data from the world is the next frontier of AI. The companies that get there first, he argues, won’t be the ones that perfected language.

“We’re basically bound by our own understanding of reality,” Germanidis told TechCrunch from Runway’s homey sunlight-filled headquarters near Union Square.