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 Prime Video has greenlit three generative animations, including Jorge Gutierrez's Punky Duck, which was withdrawn by the creator after industry backlash.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