ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 5 Runway releases since Apr 2025, most recently Project Luxo on May 28, 2026. Highlights include Runway Gen-4.5, Runway 4.5, Gen-4 References, Project Luxo. Every entry below has primary-source links and the episode segment where we covered it live, plus key numbers where we have them.
Runway launches Project Luxo for solo-creator short films
Runway launched Project Luxo, claiming AI-generated video has crossed the uncanny valley for solo-creator short films. The pitch is that a single creator can now produce watchable short-form films end to end with Runway's stack.
Runway 4.5 launches with image-to-video and audio
Runway launched version 4.5 of its video generation model, adding image-to-video and audio support. It was mentioned in the week's news rundown as part of a busy week for vision and video releases.
Runway Gen-4.5 takes #1 on the text-to-video leaderboard
Runway's Gen-4.5 video model climbed to the top of the text-to-video leaderboard with a 1,247 Elo rating. The result continued the weekly theme of video generation quality and multimodal consistency improving fast.
Runway References brings character and scene consistency to Gen-4
Runway launched References for Gen-4 on all paid plans, letting creators supply reference images (characters, outfits, locations, even selfies) and use tags in prompts to keep those elements consistent across generations. It tackles AI video's biggest pain point, frame-to-frame identity drift, at no extra credit cost per run.
Runway Gen-4 announced with major gains in video consistency
Runway announced Gen-4, its next-generation video model focused on character and world consistency across shots. Example videos showed notably coherent characters and scenes, pushing AI video further toward usable filmmaking.
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