Subscribe
A highly-praised AI video generation tool made by multi-billion dollar company Runway was secretly trained by scraping thousands of videos from popular YouTube creators and brands, as well as pirated films, according to a massive internal spreadsheet of training data obtained by 404 Media.
The model—initially codenamed Jupiter and released officially as Gen-3—drew widespread praise from the AI development community and technology outlets covering its launch when Runway released it in June. Last year, Runway raised $141 million from investors including Google and Nvidia, at a $1.5 billion valuation.
When Techcrunch asked Runway co-founder Anastasis Germanidis in June where the training data for Gen-3 came from, he would not offer specifics.
“We have an in-house research team that oversees all of our training and we use curated, internal datasets to train our models,” Germanidis told Techcrunch.