SAN JOSE, Kalifornia (PNN) - March 19, 2026 - A new real-time video AI model was demonstrated yesterday, capable of generating its first frame in less than a tenth of a second. If you think the world is out of control right now and full of AI bullshit, just wait for what is coming.
I will admit, they are catching me more often lately on social media - newsreel-style videos, dancing Donalds, Michael Jordan saying stuff that Michael Jordan never said, influencers that never existed. I pride myself on being reasonably savvy, but the telltale signs of what is generated and what is real are starting to blur.
As a reeling world struggles to get to grips with that, here comes the next salvo: real-time AI-generated video. Runway has teamed up with Nvidia to present an as-yet-unnamed video model that is under 100 milliseconds from prompt to first frame. The blink of an eye takes between 100-400 milliseconds, for reference.
Demonstrated at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference - or GTC - in San Jose yesterday, this is the first AI video generation tool that genuinely seems to start streaming instantly in high definition; so what does that mean?
Well, on the good side, it is a step towards the holodeck-style convergence I have been banging on for years now, in which we will be able to interact in real time with characters, situations and worlds of our own choosing. The ultimate video game experience in virtual reality, delivered frame by frame, à la carte, in response to your every whim. Indeed, Runway's one of many companies working on exactly this idea through playable world generation.
On the bad side, well, everything that is now taking you a second glance to spot as AI will at some point start coming at you in real time, tailored to convince or persuade you, generated using real images as a starting point, and potentially capable of reading and responding to your body language in real time. Such a strange world we are constructing for ourselves!
Either way, it will be a minute yet. Runway's demo was running on Nvidia's Vera Rubin - an AI-focused supercomputer running 36 Vero CPUs, 72 Rubin GPUs, 54 terabytes of CPU memory, 20.7 terabytes of GPU memory, and more teraflops than I would be comfortable poking a stick at. This thing can probably run Crysis.
Therefore, it is not in the hands of the spammers and scammers yet - but it is absolutely within reach of governments and corporations, and hardware limitations do not tend to remain limitations for long.
