Cristóbal Valenzuela
Founder at runwayml
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarCristóbal Valenzuela is the co-founder and CEO of Runway, a New York–based startup pioneering creative AI tools for video and media, with a decade of experience at the intersection of research and product. He combines hands-on machine learning engineering—demonstrated by substantive contributions to the popular ml5.js library, including LSTM architecture and stateful model improvements—with strategic leadership scaling an AI company featured in major outlets. His background includes research at NYU and study at NYU’s ITP, reflecting a practice rooted in both technical depth and experimental media. Cristóbal is comfortable spanning full-stack development, model internals, and user-facing integrations, often simplifying complex ML workflows for creatives. Notably, he has pushed practical updates that improve model usability and web deployment, signaling a focus on accessible, production-ready ML. He brings entrepreneurial grit and a maker’s mentality to building tools that make advanced AI tangible for creators.
10 years of coding experience
Github Skills (11)
machine-learning10
lstm10
javascript10
tensorflow10
p5js10
neural-network9
keras9
front-end-development8
apim7
api7
mobilenet6
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
ml5js/ml5-library
Oct 2017 - Nov 2018
Friendly machine learning for the web! 🤖
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:529 commits, 72 PRs, 149 pushes in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Cristóbal updated the LSTM example in the repository, modifying the implementation to use the new keras (layers) API, which involves architecture updates. The user also made changes related to the model's underlying structure, the state management, and the generation process, indicating a focus on improving the model's performance and functionality. The user further included a means to pass in the stateful parameters to the LSTM as well as code refactoring, for example, removing the need to define the cells and related method, and simplifying the sampling step.
machine-learninglstmdeep-learningimagenetjavascript
ml5js/ml5-examples
Mar 2018 - Nov 2018
A collection of ml5.js examples
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:166 commits, 33 PRs, 38 pushes in 8 months
Contributions summary:Cristóbal made several commits updating examples within the ml5.js library, reflecting changes to the API and the integration of new functionalities. The modifications involved adjustments to how images and text are handled within the p5.js library and the removal of a neural network example due to its incompatibility with the current library version. These commits also include code updates to manage DOM elements for the Style Transfer examples and a switch to utilize CDN for the library's functionalities.
ml5js
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