ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 7 Runway releases since Apr 2025, most recently GWM Worlds 2 on Sep 3, 2026. Highlights include GWM Worlds 2, Runway Gen-4.5, Solaris, Runway 4.5. Every entry below has primary-source links and the episode segment where we covered it live, plus key numbers where we have them.
Runway GWM Worlds 2: real-time 720p, 24 fps world model with 48 kHz audio
Runway's second generative world model runs in real time at 720p and 24 fps with open-ended sessions, 48 kHz audio, and generated speech, a big jump over the low-fidelity audio in most world models. LDJ broke it live on the show two days after Runway's previous world model. Research preview.
Runway Solaris: an Interface World Model that generates clickable UIs frame by frame
Solaris generates interfaces as video, so every element in a scene is clickable and draggable: click a lamp and the room lights up, drag shoes onto a person and he wears them. In Runway's own study the generated behavior was preferred 61 to 24 over Opus 5 (71% preferred it over coded UI). Research preview, no public access yet.
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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