On December 21, 2025, Runway, a superstar in the field of AI video generation, officially entered the popular track of "world models"! The company announced in a tweet on the official account of the famous social media platform "X" that it has officially launched the first universal world model GWM-1, and also claimed that it can create a dynamic simulation environment that understands physical laws and can evolve over time through frame by frame pixel prediction.
Now, Runway is standing in the same arena as giants like Google and OpenAI, competing together for the core infrastructure of next-generation embodied intelligence and general artificial intelligence. Doesn't this bring about a huge transformation to the industry? You should know that in the past, those giants had always held a dominant position in this field. Now, with the addition of Runway, the competition will undoubtedly become even more intense.
What is a world model? The unique path of Runway
The so-called 'world model', in simple terms, refers to the AI system simulating the operating mechanism of the real world internally. In this way, AI can achieve reasoning, planning, and autonomous action without having to train separately for each real-world scenario. How can we build such a model?
Runway believes that the optimal path is for the model to directly learn how to predict pixels. That is to say, learning physics, lighting, geometry, and causal relationships from video frames. The CTO of the company, Anastasia Germanidis, emphasized in a live broadcast that "to build a world model, we must first create a super powerful video model. With sufficient scale and high-quality data support, the model will naturally be able to deeply understand how the world operates
GWM-1: Three branches each display their own abilitiesGWM-1 is not a single product, but will be implemented through three specialized branches first.
GWM Worlds: Interactive Dynamic World
GWM Worlds is an interactive application. Users can set the initial scene with text prompts or images, and the model will immediately generate a dynamic world running at 24 frames per second and 720p resolution. This space not only has a coherent geometric structure and lighting logic, but also generates new content in real-time as users explore.
This ability is not only applicable to game development, but can also serve as a virtual sandbox for training AI agents to navigate and make decisions in the physical world. Imagine if the scenes in the game could change so intelligently in the future, wouldn't it be super cool?
GWM Robotics: Robot trained helpers
In the field of robotics, GWM Robotics also plays an important role. It injects variables such as weather changes and dynamic obstacles into synthetic data to help robots simulate behavior in high-risk or difficult to reproduce real-world scenarios.
More importantly, this system can identify under what conditions robots may violate safety policies or instructions, providing a new tool for reliability verification. Runway has planned to open this module to partner companies through SDK and has also revealed that it is in deep communication with multiple robotics companies. Perhaps in the future, the intelligence level of robots will be greatly improved because of it.
GWM Avatars: Digital Humans with Real Human Behavioral Logic
GWM Avatars is committed to generating digital humans with real human behavior logic for communication, training, and other scenarios. This direction echoes with D-ID, Synthesia, Soul Machines, and even Google's digital human project. Although the three major branches are currently independent models, Runway explicitly states that the ultimate goal is to integrate them into a unified universal world model.
It is worth mentioning that in the wave of AI development, different companies are exploring the application of various models. Some companies focus on image recognition, while others are making efforts in natural language processing. Runway's exploration of world models this time is undoubtedly a bold and innovative attempt.
Gen4.5 video generation model major upgrade
In addition to GWM-1, Runway has also made significant upgrades to the Gen4.5 video generation model, which was launched earlier this month. The new version supports native audio generation, one minute long multi shot video synthesis, maintains character consistency, and adds dialogue and environmental sound effects.
Users can also edit the audio of existing videos or finely adjust multi shot works of any length. This series of capabilities has brought Runway's video tools closer to Kling's recently launched "integrated video suite", marking the transition of AI video generation from creative prototypes to industrial grade tools that can be put into production. At present, the upgraded Gen4.5 has been opened to all paying users.
As the world model moves from theory to engineering implementation, Runway is using the philosophy of "pixels are physics" to build a bridge connecting virtual simulation and real action. Here, AI not only knows how to see and speak, but also begins to understand how the world operates.
I believe that in the future, Runway will bring us even more surprises.
