Jie Yang

Jie Yang is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Utopai Studios, where he leads the company’s technical vision, research strategy, and engineering execution. His work focuses on building the technology behind Utopai’s story-first studio model, including PAI, its Production Assistive Intelligence engine for creative production.

Yang leads the development of systems designed around professional production workflows, giving filmmakers greater control across development, continuity, scene planning, visualization, asset management, and production. Rather than treating AI as a standalone generation tool, his team is building technology that integrates directly into the creative process, supporting filmmakers and production teams from early development through execution.

Before co-founding Utopai Studios, Yang worked at Google Research and Google X, where he was part of the early team that incubated Mineral, an Alphabet moonshot that later became an independent company. As a founding team member and Head of Research at Mineral, he led AI projects spanning generative AI, multimodal large language models, multi-agent systems, robotic perception, time-series forecasting, and large-scale machine learning. Several initiatives he helped develop became core Mineral product lines.

Yang met Cecilia Shen while building Mineral, and the two later co-founded the company that became Utopai Studios. Throughout his career, his focus has been translating advanced AI research into practical systems for complex real-world problems. At Utopai, that work is now applied to filmmaking: developing technology that helps storytellers build coherent worlds, preserve continuity, visualize ambitious ideas, and bring them to the screen with greater creative control.

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