Jie Yang

Jie Yang is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Utopai Studios, the AI-native entertainment company building a new studio system for the AI era. Combining proprietary AI infrastructure, original IP development and real production expertise, Utopai Studios is creating a human-led model for developing, producing and scaling long-form cinematic storytelling across film, television, animation and digital platforms.

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As CTO, Yang leads the company’s technical vision, research strategy and engineering execution. He is responsible for the development of PAI, Utopai Studios’ cinematic storytelling AI system and production intelligence layer. Built specifically for professional entertainment workflows, PAI supports long-form narrative development, continuity, scene planning, visualization, asset management, production coordination and iterative creative decision-making.

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Yang’s work is central to Utopai Studios’ broader mission: to build the infrastructure layer for AI filmmaking. Rather than treating AI as a standalone generation tool, Utopai is integrating intelligence directly into the creative and production pipeline, helping filmmakers and studio partners maintain greater control, move more efficiently from development through delivery, and bring ambitious stories to market at global scale.

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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 from early concept through deployment across generative AI, multimodal large language models, multi-agent systems, robotic perception, time-series forecasting and large-scale machine learning training and inference. Several initiatives he helped create became core Mineral product lines.

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Yang met Cecilia Shen while building Mineral, and the two later co-founded the company that became Utopai Studios. His career has focused on translating advanced AI research into practical systems that solve real-world problems. At Utopai Studios, that work is now focused on entertainment: giving filmmakers, studios and creators more powerful ways to develop worlds, preserve continuity, visualize complex ideas and produce original stories with greater speed, scale and creative control.

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