The first piece of AI-generated video I ever made moved me to tears – tears of laughter. Given the chance to fool around with Runway AI's Gen-3 Alpha, I dropped in an image of an eagle carrying off a wolf. Moments later, the picture sprang into life. Except the bird only had one leg – and its plummeting prey sprouted wings from its tail and morphed into a wolf-headed goose. It was weird and hilarious.

It's hard not to feel the ripple effect when big shifts happen. One such shift came Wednesday when Lionsgate--the studio responsible for the John Wick, Hunger Games, and Twilight franchises--announced it had teamed up with artificial intelligence firm Runway for a "first-of-its-kind partnership" that would give the AI firm access to the studio's archives in order to create a custom AI tool for preproduction and postproduction on its film and TV shows. Runway's forthcoming tool will "help Lionsgate Studios, its filmmakers, directors, and other creative talent augment their work" and "generate cinematic video that can be further iterated using Runway's suite of controllable tools," according to a press release announcing the deal. If that sounds like it might pique the interest of those who have been watching AI's influence on creatives' work, it did. If anything, the new deal could serve as a test of the AI protections that unions like the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) got in their contract negotiations with studios last year.

We consider the fractional elliptic problem with Dirichlet boundary conditions on a bounded and convex domain $D$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$, with $d \geq 2$. In this paper, we perform a stochastic gradient descent algorithm that approximates the solution of the fractional problem via Deep Neural Networks. Additionally, we provide four numerical examples to test the efficiency of the algorithm, and each example will be studied for many values of $\alpha \in (1,2)$ and $d \geq 2$.

Artificial intelligence has made remarkable progress with still images. For months, services like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion have been creating beautiful, arresting and sometimes unsettling pictures. Now, a startup called Runway AI Inc. is taking the next step: AI-generated video. On Monday, New York-based Runway announced the availability of its Gen 2 system, which generates short snippets of video from a few words of user prompts. Users can type in a description of what they want to see, for example: "a cat walking in the rain," and it will generate a roughly 3-second video clip showing just that, or something close.

What makes all of this all the more shocking is that it came as a surprise to precisely no one who has been paying attention to AI language models. Here's the problem: the technology is simply not ready to be used like this at this scale. AI language models are notorious bullshitters, often presenting falsehoods as facts. They are excellent at predicting the next word in a sentence, but they have no knowledge of what the sentence actually means. That makes it incredibly dangerous to combine them with search, where it's crucial to get the facts straight.

Set up in 2018, Runway has been developing AI-powered video-editing software for several years. Its tools are used by TikTokers and YouTubers as well as mainstream movie and TV studios. The makers of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert used Runway software to edit the show's graphics; the visual effects team behind the hit movie Everything Everywhere All at Once used the company's tech to help create certain scenes. In 2021, Runway collaborated with researchers at the University of Munich to build the first version of Stable Diffusion. Stability AI, a UK-based startup, then stepped in to pay the computing costs required to train the model on much more data.

Venture capitalists are rushing to invest in artificial intelligence start-ups as growing hype around "generative AI" fills the void left by failing cryptocurrency and blockchain ventures. The recent leap in developments of sophisticated computer programs that can write scripts and create art in seconds has driven a surge of investor interest, creating a rare bright spot in a start-up landscape dominated by tumbling valuations and job cuts. OpenAI, a San Francisco-based company in which Microsoft is the largest funder, released the newest form of its GPT-3.5 software to the public last week, which can converse with users through text: answer follow-up questions, admit mistakes and reject inappropriate requests. In five days, ChatGPT surpassed 1mn users and was praised by billionaire Elon Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI who left the board in 2018, who tweeted: "ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI."

One of the companies behind text-to-image AI system Stable Diffusion is hosting a film festival exclusively for shorts that were made with AI. Organizers of Runway ML's AI Film Festival are accepting films with a runtime of between one and 10 minutes that either include AI-generated content or were pieced together with AI-powered editing techniques. According to Fast Company, Runway said creators won't be penalized if they use AI tools from other companies. Along with text-to-image generation, creatives can use techniques such as background removal, frame interpolation and motion tracking to help make their films. "I think we're heading to a future where a lot of the content and the entertainment and the media that you see online will be generated," Runway cofounder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela said.

Runway's cofounders (from left) Anastasis Germanidis, Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz and Cristóbal Valenzuela are immigrants who met while studying as art students at New York University. Runway ML, one of the two startups behind the popular AI text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, has raised new funding at a $500 million valuation, Forbes has learned. Felicis is leading the new funding, the sources said, which comes on the heels of a boom in generative AI that has captured the public's attention in recent months thanks to releases that also include OpenAI's Dall-E and ChatGPT. Runway quickly emerged as one of the buzziest startups in the mix with its video editing software, for which the company has been releasing a bevy of generative AI features. For example, from a photo of a forest, a user can type a short text phrase into Runway's software and instantly conjure a lake or a castle among the trees.

RunwayML, a Brooklyn-based startup building a library of AI-powered tools for designers, artists, and other creators, has raised $8.5 million in venture capital. The company says the funds will be used to accelerate its go-to-market efforts as looks to increase the size of its product development teams. Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela argues that for decades, the over $2.1 trillion media industry has relied on "incremental iterations" of familiar old tools. While some of those tools have become "smarter" in recent years, they're rooted in an outdated paradigm reliant on expensive, time-consuming processes. Corporate videos of all types range from $500 to $10,000 per finished minute -- minutes that take days, weeks, or even months to produce.