Runway brings on Paris lab Kinetix's team
Runway is bringing in the team from Paris-based AI lab Kinetix to work on world models for robotics, adding expertise in 3D human motion and physically grounded video generation.
Runway announced that the team from Kinetix, a Paris-based AI research lab, is joining the company. The team's work on 3D human motion and physically grounded video generation will feed into Runway's research on world models for robotics. Kinetix staff will join Runway's Paris hub.
Runway presents the move as part of its push into "real-world intelligence and generalist robotics." The company says a useful robot has to handle new environments, tasks and situations, and that large-scale video pretraining is "the most efficient path" to that kind of generalization.
"Robotics is going to be one of the biggest applications of world models, and it's an area we're deeply focused on," said Anastasis Germanidis, Runway's co-CEO. "We've spent years teaching models to understand and simulate the world. The next step is teaching them how to take actions in the world."
Kinetix CEO Yassine Tahi said the company was founded six years ago on a bet that "understanding how bodies move through space was one of the most important open problems in AI." Tahi said joining Runway lets the team work on "how to build models that can act and react in the physical world" with the resources to scale globally.
The announcement does not give financial terms or say whether this is an acquisition of the company or a hire of its team. It also doesn't say how many people are joining or what happens to Kinetix's existing products. Runway said it is hiring for research and engineering roles in Paris.