World Models and Visual Resoning: The Next Frontier for Media & Entertainment

World Models: The Next Frontier for Media & Entertainment

🗓 Wednesday, October 14, 2026 · 1:00 – 2:30 PM PT 📍 2450 Colorado Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90404

✨ ABOUT THIS SESSION

For decades, on-screen worlds have been built by hand. Designers and VFX artists study real-world physics, then bend it to their imagination. World models extend that craft. Video models can generate a shot; world models aim to generate the whole world it lives in: a persistent, physics-aware environment a director can move through, re-light, and come back to tomorrow and find unchanged. For previs, virtual production, and interactive formats, that means more ideas get tested before anyone commits a crew or a stage day to them.

Generating a world is half the story. The other half is understanding one. As AI moves from producing frames to interpreting them, visual reasoning matters just as much: answering open-ended questions about what footage implies, including physical constraints, cause and effect, and multi-step inference. Identifying what is in the footage and where is largely solved. Understanding what it means, and what follows from it, is the open problem, and it's what Elorian's team is focused on.

Founders from Reactor and Elorian sit down to talk through what's possible, share a demo, and discuss how they collaborate with creatives today.

🕐 SCHEDULE

1:00 PM — Opening & Fireside Chat AWS-led overview of the world models landscape and its impact on M&E, and moderated conversation with founders — building world models, technical challenges, what's next.

1:30 PM — Live Demo Hands-on demonstration of world-model applications in action

1:45 PM — Networking Light refreshments and informal conversations

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🎤 SPEAKERS

⚡ Reactor — reactor.inc Bryce Schmidtchen is co-founder and CTO of Reactor, which builds the platform for real-time AI inference — developer tools and APIs for real-time generative video, world models, and more.

Before Reactor, he was a technical lead on Apple Vision Pro, working at the intersection of real-time graphics and spatial computing. Reactor emerged from stealth in 2026 with $59M led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, alongside WndrCo, Amplify Partners, Sky9 Capital, and FPV Ventures.

⚡ Elorian — elorian.ai Andrew Dai, Co-Founder Elorian AI

Experienced principal Researcher/Software Engineer manager with a demonstrated history of working in deep learning, in particular natural language understanding, medical records and large language models. Managing a team of researchers for large language models. Strong researcher with a Ph.D. focused in Machine Learning from University of Edinburgh. Chinese name: 戴明博

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This event is a part of #LATechWeek—a week of events hosted by VCs and startups to bring together the tech ecosystem. Learn more at www.tech-week.com.