Runway couldn't fix a bug in its AI video model, so it turned the bug into a feature

Runway spent weeks trying to engineer its way out of a stubborn bug: AI-generated avatars would drift off-center during real-time video generation. The fix wasn't a back-end patch — it was a new front-end feature that just worked around the problem. That's the kind of lesson Ryan Phillips, head of enterprise product at Runway ML, walked through at VB Transform 2026, arguing that even companies not building foundation models themselves can learn from how Runway builds, evaluates, and ships them."I think even if you are not all building models yourselves, it's helpful to learn how we do it because I think almost all of the lessons are applicable to what you all are doing day-to-day," Phillips said.Runway is an applied AI research company building general world models to power generative tool…