Fal Media Cloud Platform Announces Kindred Ventures Founder Steve Jang to Attend San Francisco GenMedia Conference 2026
Fal Media Cloud Platform has announced that Steve Jang, founder and managing partner of Kindred Ventures, will attend the San Francisco GenMedia Conference 2026. He will engage in a fireside chat with Albert Cheng, head of AI Studios at Amazon MGM Studios, discussing how studios are adopting generative tools and the next phase of filmmaking that investors are watching.
The conference will be held on September 24, themed "The New Original," hosted by fal, targeting entertainment, advertising, gaming, e-commerce, and enterprise deployment. The agenda will feature cutting-edge model research alongside large-scale implementation on the same day. The guest list also includes filmmaker Taika Waititi, former Disney production president and current B5 Studios founder Sean Bailey, World Labs co-founder Justin Johnson, a16z investment partner Justine Moore, JioStar's Senior Vice President of Generative Content and Technology Stephan Bugaj, and fal co-founder and CEO Burkay Gur. Last year's headliner was DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Steve Jang is a board member and investor at fal, with the fund's early bets on consumer internet, AI, and robotics, including Uber, Coinbase, and Perplexity AI. Kindred manages approximately $600 million, with discussions on a new fund of about $355 million. He has recently framed generative media companies within the same investment context as world models and physical AI, stating that fal has expanded from video, audio, and image hosting to world models.
Albert Cheng comes from Disney-ABC and Prime Video's U.S. operations and is now responsible for Amazon MGM's AI Studios. The studio launched the GenAI Creators’ Fund and production platform Project Nara in collaboration with AWS, integrating third-party models like Kling and proprietary data training tools. He stated that AI has crossed the uncanny valley, allowing large scenes to be brought back to Los Angeles studios; the goal is to expand annual production from a dozen series to hundreds of concurrent productions. Prime Video has greenlit three generative animations, including Jorge Gutierrez's Punky Duck, which was withdrawn by the creator after industry backlash. The second season of House of David is being used as a proof of concept, with AI shots increasing from 73 in the first season to over 350.
Fal provides developers with a unified interface for image, video, and audio models and a diffusion model inference engine, claiming to serve over 2.5 million developers and has launched video models like H3 Max. The conference is open only to approved guests. The following day, there will be generative narrative screenings and masterclasses.
In market mechanisms, what is bought is the studio's inclusion of generative pipelines in budgets, while what is sold includes inference APIs, dedicated clusters, and creator fund slots. Funding is shifting from traditional visual effects outsourcing and studio time to pay-per-second generative computing power and cloud production platforms. Beneficiaries include fal, AWS, and model vendors already on studio lists; those under pressure are small to medium-sized visual effects companies that quote per shot and animation guild projects that reject generative tools. The event is driven by guest confirmations the day before the conference, aimed at aligning studio procurement and venture capital on the same screen.
On the studio side, there is still an emphasis on human involvement and real actor voiceovers, while demonstrating that more projects can get greenlit with cost and speed. Investors are looking for repeatable control: character consistency, shot paths, and the final mile to a finished film, rather than demo-level prompts.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
The fal-hosted generative media conference essentially aims to turn inference cloud into an industry trade fair. Steve Jang, as both an investor and board member, places the invested company alongside Amazon MGM, which is a common distribution strategy for early funds: using the conference to warm up clients, talent, and the next round of pricing. He has transitioned from imeem and SoundTracking to Bitski, and has scaled Kindred from an angel fund to a multi-hundred-million AUM, expanding his investment radius from consumer applications to computing power and world models. By mentioning fal alongside physical AI, it indicates that generative video is viewed as data and simulation layers of robot world models, rather than just short video filters.
Amazon's capital path is more rigid. After acquiring MGM, the film library and Prime subscribers need to be diluted by more series, with visual effects and studio time being bottlenecks. Cheng's task is to prove that AI can bring unfilmable scenes back to their own studios, locking in the production operating system with AWS computing power and Project Nara. The Creators’ Fund is a subsidy experiment, while Nara aims to integrate third-party models into studio workflows. The withdrawal of Punky Duck indicates that unions and author reputations can still veto projects; the addition of shots in House of David shows that already approved live-action series can better absorb the tools. Money flows from content budgets into cloud bills, then back into the number of projects that can get greenlit.
Analogous examples include NVIDIA's GTC selling cards at developer conferences and Adobe Max selling subscriptions at creator conferences. The industry phase is shifting from model demonstrations to studio procurement. Google DeepMind, Black Forest Labs, and World Labs are present, indicating that infrastructure providers and studios are competing over "who defines the standards for finished films." Executives from Netflix and Disney appearing in the same circle suggests that procurement decisions have moved from the lab to the production president's calendar.
The structural judgment is that technology substitution overlaps with the transfer of pricing power. The substitutes are concept art, previs, and some intermediate composites, not director credits. The mechanism is: once generative quality can maintain character and lighting across shots, visual effects pricing shifts from "man-days" to "GPU seconds plus review man-days." Whoever controls inference latency and studio data loops will participate in defining what constitutes a usable finished film. The conference places investors and studios in the same fireside chat to align the next round of valuations directly with procurement budgets, rather than demo view counts.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Industry conferences sell procurement calendars, not speeches.
The day investors and studios share the stage, demos end, and budgets begin.
Only those who can maintain character consistency across shots deserve a place in the cost sheet for finished films.