Jie Yang

Jie Yang is the Co-founder and CTO of Utopai Studios, where he leads the company’s research, engineering, and technical artist teams in building the future of AI-driven filmmaking. His work integrates large-scale generative models, cinematic media generation, and multimodal agent systems into a fully AI-native production pipeline designed for professional, end-to-end cinematic creation. Jie’s expertise spans multimodal foundation models, controllable video generation, and large-scale systems for creative intelligence, shaping Utopai’s vision for next-generation film production.

Before founding Utopai, Jie worked at Google Research and Google X, where he joined the early team that incubated Mineral, an ambitious moonshot project that later became an independent Alphabet company. As part of the founding team and Head of Research, he led multiple initiatives from ideation to deployment, building AI-native systems powered by generative AI, multimodal LLMs, multi-agent systems, robotic perception, time-series forecasting, and large-scale ML training and inference pipelines. Several of the projects he initiated and developed from the ground up became Mineral’s core product lines and primary revenue drivers, establishing him as a key technical leader shaping the project’s transformation into a company. It was also at Mineral that Jie met Cecilia, who would later co-found Utopai Studios (formerly Cybever) with him.

Jie’s mission is to redefine filmmaking as a faster, more precise and expressive creative process, where technology amplifies human imagination instead of limiting it. He is committed to building models and tools that allow filmmakers, artists, and storytellers to pursue their creative vision with greater quality, precision, and efficiency.