Everything will be Simulated#

Cristóbal Valenzuela (Runway, Co-Founder and Co-CEO)

• Why: Not infrastructure — but a genuinely new claim about where interfaces are going: video models conditioned on user actions, no 3D engine underneath. If real, it changes what "an application" is and what the clients of your infrastructure will be rendering.
• What: The progression: next-frame prediction at scale learns physics, object permanence, occlusion, and gravity as by-products (Runway benchmarks on geometry and physical behavior, not just preference); game-like playable environments emerge without a physics engine or any rules being written; then "world interface models" — a car image where clicks turn the lights, rotate the view, open the hood, with the label text generated as part of the interaction and no Unity/Unreal/Blender representation anywhere. Continuum extends this into an OS-like research surface: select any passage on a webpage and turn it into an interactive "portal" (SF fog, batteries, photosynthesis) that persists as a visual memory, responds to resizing as an input, and can be revisited and re-entered.
• How: Actions become conditioning for the next frame rather than inputs to a modeled scene; interactivity is the constraint that shifts generation from seconds/minutes to real time. The robotics connection is explicit (a lab at Runway using these models as "brains" for embodied systems), and "visual thinking" connects it to agents: a coding agent spins up a Continuum visualization to reason through a 3D-printable bike mount, giving human and agent a shared visual workspace to point at. Honest framing throughout: realism ≠ physically accurate simulation, and a generated explanation still needs to be judged for accuracy.
• Where applicable: Research demos with an announced intent to release much of it in 8–12 months; the physical-accuracy caveat is the load-bearing limitation. Worth watching as a bet on where interactive compute goes.