Zijian He

Zijian He is Chief Scientific Officer at Utopai Studios, where he leads the company’s AI research and the development of next-generation multimodal foundation models for cinematic production. His work supports PAI, Utopai’s Production Assistive Intelligence engine, with a focus on controllability, consistency, visual understanding, and systems designed to respond to human creative direction.

At Utopai, He’s research bridges foundational AI with the realities of professional production. His team develops technology for character and world consistency, scene understanding, visual continuity, cinematic generation, and iterative creative workflows. The goal is not simply to generate more content, but to build models capable of supporting the precision, intention, and control required by filmmakers and production teams.

Before joining Utopai Studios, He led the Media Generation foundation model team at Meta’s Superintelligence Lab and co-led major generative AI initiatives, including Meta Movie Gen and Llama Image Generation. Earlier in his career at Meta, he led teams developing foundational AI technologies deployed across consumer-scale products, including real-time depth estimation systems for Quest 2 and Quest 3, as well as on-device image recognition and detection models used across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.

With more than a decade of experience building AI systems at global scale, He brings expertise across multimodal modeling, large-scale pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, generative AI, and computer vision. At Utopai, he is applying that experience to production-ready technology designed to expand what storytellers can make while keeping judgment, authorship, and creative intent in human hands.

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