MANHATTAN — An audience of industry insiders gathered in Manhattan for the Runway AI Summit, hosted by the New York-based AI company Runway. The event featured keynotes and demonstrations of the company's generative AI tools, drawing executives from major entertainment and technology firms.

Runway cofounder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela delivered a 10 a.m. keynote titled "The Normalization of Magic: AI and What's Ahead of Us." The title nodded to science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke's third law, which states that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Clarke outlined the three laws in a 1962 essay. During his remarks, Valenzuela declared, "AI has become the conversation." An AI-generated video shown at the summit depicted an old man on a subway reading a newspaper with the headline "AI Has Become the Conversation," while another AI-generated image projected onstage depicted Apple cofounder Steve Jobs striding through an ancient Athenian agora with a toga-clad sage.

Several executives at the summit described generative AI as a technological feat on par with the discovery of fire. Phil Wiser, chief technology officer at Paramount, said he wanted to describe the benefits of AI without being "hypey or hyperbolic." Wiser claimed that generative AI ranks among the top 10—and possibly the top five—technology trends of all time alongside the printing press and fire.

Runway offers a suite of text-to-video generation and visual effects tools for creatives and operates an annual AI-generated film competition. Summit guests received free T-shirts with the phrase "Thank You For Generating With Us!" styled in the Bookman font used on "Thank You For Shopping With Us!" plastic bags. The head of Adobe's new AI business ventures also spoke at the event and projected onscreen an equation stating (Humanity x Creativity) AI = Unlimited Possibility.

Film producer Kathleen Kennedy, 72, who stepped down as head of Lucasfilm earlier this year, stressed the importance of experiences like chance and accident to the creative process and underlined the value of "thinking time." "I'm gonna sound like a traditionalist!" Kennedy said. "How are you going to teach taste? Taste is fundamental. It does define the choices you're making." A speaker at the summit recounted that during a recent Star Wars film production, 3-D printed props began breaking after a few takes because they were not built by skilled prop masters—an anecdote used to illustrate the limits of technology in replacing craft expertise.

The summit took place less than a week after OpenAI shut down its video app Sora, a move that disrupted OpenAI's $1 billion deal with Disney.