A 100-person startup just beat the tech giants at their own game. AI company Runway dropped Gen 4.5 today, a video generation model that's crushing Google and OpenAI on independent benchmarks. The model grabbed the top spot on Video Arena's leaderboard, pushing Google's Veo 3 to second place and leaving OpenAI's Sora 2 Pro trailing in seventh.
David just took down Goliath in the AI video wars. Runway, a scrappy startup with barely 100 employees, announced Gen 4.5 today - and it's already demolishing competition from tech's biggest players on the only benchmark that really matters.
The model grabbed the number one spot on Video Arena's leaderboard, maintained by independent AI analysis firm Artificial Analysis. That puts it ahead of Google's Veo 3 in second place, and way ahead of OpenAI's Sora 2 Pro, which sits in seventh.
What makes this particularly stinging for the big tech companies? Video Arena uses blind testing - people compare outputs without knowing which company made what. Pure user preference, no brand bias. "We managed to out-compete trillion-dollar companies with a team of 100 people," Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela told CNBC today. "You can get to frontiers just by being extremely focused and diligent."
Gen 4.5 transforms text prompts into high-definition videos, but the real breakthrough is in the details. The model understands physics, human motion, camera movements, and cause-and-effect relationships in ways that apparently leave the competition scrambling. Users describe the motion and action they want, and Gen 4.5 delivers results that consistently beat what Google and OpenAI are producing.
The timing couldn't be more pointed. While OpenAI has been making headlines with Sora's Hollywood partnerships and Google pushed hard on Veo's capabilities, Runway - founded in 2018 and valued at $3.55 billion according to PitchBook - was quietly building what its CEO calls "an overnight success that took seven years."
Valenzuela codenamed the model "David" for obvious reasons, and the biblical reference fits. This is exactly the kind of David-versus-Goliath story that startup Silicon Valley loves, but it's happening in one of AI's most competitive spaces. Video generation has become a proxy war for which company truly understands multimodal AI.
