Runway launches its first world model as it upgrades Gen 4.5 with native audio

Runway has taken a major step in the intensifying race to build world models, announcing its first system, GWM-1, alongside a significant upgrade to its flagship Gen 4.5 video model. The dual release signals the American tech company’s push to position itself at the front of an industry quickly shifting from experimental research to deployable, production-grade tools.

The new GWM-1 model marks Runway’s formal entry into a field that several AI labs and Big Tech companies have been accelerating toward. These systems aim to learn an internal simulation of how the real world works, enabling AI to reason, plan, and act without encountering every scenario in the training data.

Runway says its approach focuses on frame-by-frame prediction, giving the model a sense of physics, movement, and env