Technologist and artist Cristóbal Valenzuela on powering your creative work with artificial intelligence, co-founding RunwayML to put machine learning in the hands of creators, and his take on simple living and creativity.


Cristóbal Valenzuela is a technologist, artist and software developer interested in the intersection between artificial intelligence and creative tools. He is co-founder of Runway and researcher at New York University ITP.

Previously, he co-founded Latent Studio, a creative studio specializing in machine learning and artificial intelligence. He also contributes to OSS and helps maintain ml5.js. His work has been sponsored by Google and the Processing Foundation and his projects has been exhibited in Latin America and the US, including NeurIPS, Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art, ARS Electronica, GAM, ACADIA, Fundación Telefonica, Lollapalooza, NYC Media Lab, New Latin Wave, DOCLAB, Inter-American Development Bank, Stanford University and New York University.

Connect with Cristóbal on his website, Twitter (@c_valenzuelab), or GitHub (@cvalenzuela).


Favorite quotes


"For me, simplicity is anything that allows you to concentrate your energy on meaningful tasks so you don't spend time around things that are not necessary."
"Simple is hard to get and understand. There's no simplicity law."
"Being surrounded by people that are not in your field [and things] not related to what you do often, not common to your day to day [makes me more creative]."
"The main idea of Runway is to enable creative people to use and benefit from artificial intelligence in a way that's common to a language they understand."
"Anyone can do anything [with the right mindset and time]."
"We are on the verge of a new creative revolution. [Machine intelligence] is producing radical changes in the way digital content is made, understood, and processed, unfastening previously unimagined ways of creating."


Links



NYU ITP


Runway ML


Machine learning


ml5.js


Processing


Processing.py


Processing for Android


p5.js


Processing Foundation


Google Summer of Code‌


The origins of ml5.js (article)

TensorFlow.js (formerly deeplearn.js)

Canvas API


MNIST


LSTM (Long short-term memory)

Style transfer


Pix2Pix


PoseNet


im2txt


GAN (Generative adversarial networks)

Ars Electronica


Inaccurate Collaborations (project)

Marrow (project)

Lobe.ai


Sketching Interfaces


Google PAIR


Naming ml5 (and other name ideas)

Rest of you (video)

iTerm (app)

Visual Studio Code (app)

Paperspace


Clear (app)

How to make your iPhone black and white (article)

The New Yorker


Building accessible tools for artists by Cris (article)

Books



Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas (book)

People mentioned



Daniel Shiffman


Yining Shi


Dan Oved


Alejandro Matamala Ortiz


Anastasis Germanidis


Shirin Anlen


Gene Kogan


Mario Klingemann


Memo Akten


Hana Davis


Mimi Onuoha


David Ha


Martin Wattenberg


Fernanda Viegas


Daniel Smilkov


Nikhil Thorat


Kyle McDonald


Jabrils


Daniel O'Sullivan


Carolina Pino


Nathan Melenbrink


Chapters


00:33 · Intro
02:29 · Cristóbal Valenzuela
08:18 · ml5
10:44 · Naming ml5
11:50 · Experiments
13:07 · Open source
14:17 · Runway
14:57 · Exposing it to people
16:43 · Runway's roadmap
18:28 · Projects
20:44 · Machine learning
22:19 · Visual artists
23:47 · Other companies
24:43 · Cristobal Valenzuela
24:58 · Day-to-day
25:44 · Commute
26:24 · Exercise
26:54 · Meditative moments
27:14 · Simple living
27:41 · Complexity
28:20 · Hobbies
28:40 · Book recommendations
29:50 · Artificial intelligence on simplicity
30:33 · Your contribution to artificial intelligence
31:26 · Ideal work
31:57 · Starting a startup
34:33 · Focus, flow, and music
36:00 · Distractions
36:41 · Work-in-progress
37:13 · Creativity
38:32 · Serendipity?
39:36 · @c_valenzuelab
39:52 · Ideas
40:35 · Deliberate practice
41:11 · Digital tools
42:23 · The sandbox folder
43:10 · Favorite user interface
44:31 · Simplicity
45:02 · Intuitive
45:33 · Healthy tech
47:10 · Addictive tech
48:42 · Measuring "success"
49:07 · Disconnect
50:25 · Boredom
51:48 · Email
52:29 · Away from the screen
53:11 · Money
54:07 · A positive purchase
54:52 · Clothing
55:30 · Physical clutter
56:10 · Traveling light
56:48 · Personal success
57:31 · A message to yourself
59:01 · A sentence to the world
59:44 · Worries
01:01:49 · Impostor syndrome
01:02:26 · Habit-changing software
01:03:28 · Environment
01:03:59 · Connect with Cris
01:05:09 · New York vs Chile


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Theme song Sleep by Steve Combs under CC BY 4.0.


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