• Ben Affleck

  

  Filmmaker, entrepreneur

  For a while there, it seemed like Affleck would emerge as a leader of Hollywood’s anti-AI resistance. In late 2024, the actor showed up, rather incongruously, at a CNBC summit, displaying an unexpectedly deep understanding of the inner workings of the technology, and voiced an eloquent defense of human creativity against the Gen-AI onslaught: “The movies will be one of the last things … to be replaced by AI.” He added, in a pithy soundbite that soothed some of the industry’s anguish: “AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan; it cannot write you Shakespeare.” He echoed the sentiment a year later, telling Joe Rogan that AI writing is “really shitty” because “by its nature, it goes to the mean.” While those skeptical comments made the headlines — and gave the succor to the disbelievers — Affleck also expressed his belief that AI could be more effective at below-the-line tasks: “I wouldn’t want to be in the visual effects business,” he said. “They’re in trouble.” Then, in March, he made an announcement that helped explain why he was so articulate on the matter: He had secretly co-founded an AI postproduction startup called InterPositive that was acquired by Netflix in a deal estimated by some to be worth $600 million. If you can’t beat ’em …

• Prem Akkaraju

  

  CEO, Stability AI

  Of all the AI film companies cropping up like weeds around Hollywood, Stability AI has the most prestige firepower behind it. Yes, that’s due in part to the presence of James Cameron on the board of directors. But Cameron himself was surely swayed by the leadership of Akkaraju, the former CEO of New Zealand’s Weta, the Oscar-winning visual effects studio behind Avatar, Avengers: Endgame and The Lord of the Rings. “The next decade will be the best time to be a creator,” predicts Akkaraju, who also executive produced the Oscar-nominated 2021 hit The White Tiger. “New compelling IP, the birth of franchises and boundary-pushing ideas and innovations in storytelling will be commonplace. That said, the proliferation of content homogenization or AI slop is a real risk.” This dynamic, Akkaraju notes, “will produce a stark contrast between AI-created works and AI-enabled works from talented artists that will ultimately favor the latter and underscore the importance of the human at the center of creativity.”

• Sam Altman and Fidji Simo

  

  CEOs, Open AI

  Since releasing ChatGPT into the wild in the fall of 2022, single-handedly kicking off the consumer AI era, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has become the technology’s most visible face, a messiah to the believers and an archvillain to the haters. By contrast, CEO of applications Fidji Simo, the French businesswoman who ran Facebook’s operations, has proved less controversial — though perhaps more of a cipher (which may be a plus). OpenAI’s persistent efforts to infiltrate Hollywood — an industry whose disdain for AI was chanted loud and clear from the picket lines of the writers and actors strikes in 2023 — were well known. They came to fruition when Disney announced an IP partnership with Sora — OpenAI’s text-to-video social media slop machine — late last year, triggering an outcry within the industry. But on March 24, Altman suddenly got a whole lot less influential in town when he abruptly discontinued Sora and an apparently blindsided Disney pulled its $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI. The change, of course, extended a bad news cycle for Altman, who had just been lambasted for lending its tech to the Pentagon to be used in autonomous weapons, and whose reputation for dishonesty increasingly was making headlines. But those cheering Altman’s apparent retreat from Hollywood may be premature. For one thing, much of the industry relies on ChatGPT just like the rest of us — including for script development, whether or not they admit it. And Altman is the baddie in one of next awards season’s most anticipated dramas, Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, ensuring he doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

• Darren Aronofsky

  

  Filmmaker

  It’s hard to overstate the influence the genre-smashing auteur Aronofsky has had on filmmaking, with provocations becoming either massive hits (Black Swan) critical darlings (mother!) or critical punching bags that are later reevaluated as masterpieces (The Fountain). But Aronofsky has had a side hustle of sorts making tech-enhanced cinema — see his long-running Sphere short, the thrillingly mankind-spanning Postcard From Earth. Lately, he’s turned his attention to AI with a company he created called Primordial Soup that pokes around on what can be accomplished with the tech. Google DeepMind has given him unfettered use of its tools, and poke he has. Aronofsky earned some quiet praise for a movie Primordial Soup produced, Eliza McNitt’s Ancestra, that used the tech in interesting ways last year. Recently, he‘s also been dragged for the project On This Day …, a prolific set of Revolutionary War shorts prompted by AI instead of shot with traditional human (expensive) reconstructions. The tech is actually harmonizing better with the story in recent episodes, but regardless, how many great filmmakers are even willing to get their hands dirty with AI? And how many have proved as often as he has that today’s walkouts are tomorrow’s classics? Expect Aronofsky to continue being a force on the AI storytelling front, blending tech and high-end chops in a way that gets people mad and talking — exactly the way he likes it.

• Justine Bateman

  

  Activist, filmmaker

  If all that you know of Bateman’s anti-AI efforts are from her outspokenness on the 2023 picket lines, you haven’t been keeping up. Bateman has continued that self-proclaimed mission not just by sounding the bell about the dangers and emptiness of model-driven filmmaking but creating an organization that demonstrates it (and demonstrates the value of the human kind). Credo 23 has as its goal “making very human, very raw, very real films/series” and has even created a “no-AI” film festival in Hollywood two years running, attracting the likes of Sean Baker to participate. (Her cottage-industry movement seems to be attracting prominent members by the day.) Kind of like Al Gore on climate change, Bateman on AI in Hollywood offers a mix of doom and hope: Basically, everything is going to hell, but we’ll come out better on the other side. “The majority of filmed entertainment will continue to be ‘content,’ the background visuals the streamers want you playing while you’re scrolling through your social media feeds. And much of that will be customized to your viewing history via AI,” she says of her projection for the next five years. “However, what is growing is the ‘New Film Business,’ where filmmakers are making fresh new work that doesn’t use AI or check boxes, etc. As the ‘New’ gets bigger, it will become the far more interesting story.”

• Tricia Biggio

  

  CEO, Invisible Universe

  A few years ago, Biggio and Invisible Universe were tearing it up in a manner not terribly related to AI: The animation studio was behind Quai Quai, the social media phenom that Invisible Universe and Serena Williams drove forward in multiple media based on the tennis star’s daughter’s doll. Such frenzies may have slowed down in this post-hype social media age, but Biggio hasn’t. The co-founder and CEO continues to form partnerships and generate animated content — only now with AI — continuing to bring a kind of commercialist whimsy to nearly everything she does. A former MGM and Snap exec, Biggio is all in on the storytelling possibilities of the tech: “The convergence of shortform and mobile video with the democratization of content creation through AI is going to dramatically accelerate what’s possible. … The greater speed and scale should ultimately be a net positive for Hollywood,” she tells THR. Biggio’s role will be in more brand- and commercial-driven storytelling, but that’s OK: It will allow for interesting AI-enabled experiments that more fussy auteurs won’t be willing to touch.
  

• James Cameron 

  

  Filmmaker

  When Cameron opines on the future, Hollywood listens. And not just because his embrace of cutting-edge tech — from perfecting CGI in movies like The Abyss and Titanic to pioneering virtual production with Avatar — has made him one of the highest-grossing filmmakers of all time. With his Terminator films, Cameron so vividly imagined the nightmarish consequences of technology gone rogue that the story’s fictional robotics company, Skynet, has become a byword for the AI apocalypse. With the emergence of Gen AI, the director once again seems torn between enthusiasm and skepticism. True to his early adopter instincts, he joined the board of Stability AI, expressing the belief that, rather than supplant VFX artists, generative AI could allow for them to create more of the kinds of grand spectacles Cameron has made a specialty of. So it’s something of a paradox that he chose to open Avatar: Fire and Ash with a title card stating that “no generative AI was used in the making of this movie.” He’s said he believes Hollywood eventually will find the right balance, using the AI in a way that complements rather than replaces human artistry. “We’ll find our way through that,” he has said, before tempering his confidence with Skynet warnings: “But we can only find our way through it as artists if we exist.”

• Albert Cheng and Girish Bajaj

  

  Executives, Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios

  He’s only been at the job since last summer, but Cheng, former head of Prime Studios turned AI chief, and Bajaj, his vp software engineering, have been implementing a whole lot of AI initiatives for their filmmakers. Chief among them are the tools provided House of David creator Jon Erwin, who has talked admirably of the work the company has done to allow massive historical reconstructions done speedily and at lower cost. Other directors aren’t far behind — Cheng is leading a beta test for new Amazon AI tools with an undisclosed group of filmmakers whose results will be revealed in May. He’s keeping the focus firmly on the filmmaker though: “In five years and in ten, the best content will be human-led,” he tells THR. “AI will be a part of most production workflows, accelerating everything from pre-production to visual effects, but the creative vision that makes a story resonate will always come from a human being.” Bajaj, meanwhile, has used AI to create consumer-facing features like dialogue boosting to help viewers hear shows more easily and personalized AI recaps on individual episodes. With the company already demonstrating it can satisfy consumers’ retail needs like few others, expect more such innovations on the entertainment side from this pair, impacting the public at an unusually wide scale.

• Josh D’Amaro

  

  CEO, Disney

  We’ll be honest: When we first added the incoming Disney CEO to this list, the announced partnership between the House of Mouse and OpenAI — whereby the latter’s video generator Sora would have access to Disney’s IP and streaming service in exchange for Disney’s equity investment of $1 billion — was still in force. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has since scuttled Sora for reasons that remain unclear, and Disney retracted its stake. But what is clear is Disney’s continued commitment to swimming with the AI current rather than against it, as evidenced by a recent internal summit the company organized to promote the use of AI across all its departments. “This is when the Walt Disney Co. thrives,” D’Amaro told ABC News, “when technology intersects with brilliant people and creativity, and we’re in that moment right now.” Sitting next to his successor, outgoing Disney chief Bob Iger said that D’Amaro’s openness to integrating AI was “one of the reasons Josh was chosen for this position.”

• Dane Glasgow and Phil Wiser

  

  Executives, Paramount

  In acquiring Paramount, David Ellison presented himself as the savior of cinema. It’s unclear how he plans to go about that, but whatever his strategy is, AI is part of it. He’s presumably well disposed toward the technology given that it’s made his father/bankroller, cloud software billionaire Larry Ellison, even richer. His AI aspirations can be surmised from his staffing decisions. On the consumer-facing side, he’s hired Glasgow, a former vp product management at Meta who launched a machine-learning fintech startup as well as an augmented- and virtual-reality video game engine. On the production side, Ellison retained CTO Phil Wiser, a dot-com-era tech entrepreneur and former CTO at Sony, Hearst and CBS (before it merged with Paramount). An unabashed techno-optimist, Wiser (pictured) has said AI is already working its way into production from the bottom up, via script coverage. “We’ve got teams that are bringing in hundreds, if not thousands, of scripts,” he boasted at a recent conference. “They have to summarize those and then maybe modify those to see what’s interesting. AI is a great application for that.”

• Kathleen Grace 

  

  Executive, Lionsgate

  If you’re going to be a chief AI officer, may as well be the first one. That was the honor Grace received when she was named to the spot by Lionsgae brass in February. With experience at YouTube and the rights-tracking AI firm Vermillio, Grace will look to set the tone for how studios could help everyone from filmmakers to social teams do their jobs; as it has with Hollywood generally, the mid-major could prove a disruptive force. Grace is keeping details of her gig close to her vest, but she did tell THR that she sees the role as additive, no matter what activists worried about job displacement might say. “Our goal is to make more space for creative ambition, not less, and to support the visions of our filmmakers and showrunners, not replace them. I’m not going to pretend that there isn’t a pressure to be more efficient in our business today,” she says. “But that efficiency doesn’t have to mean fewer voices. It can just mean giving creative teams better tools earlier in the process.”

• Lucy Guo

  

  Executive, Scale AI

  As flexes go, this one’s hard to beat: In April 2025, then 31-year-old Guo surpassed Taylor Swift as the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world when Meta bought Scale AI, the training data–labeling company she’d co-founded nine years earlier with Alexandr Wang, for $25 billion. The Carnegie Mellon dropout had left Scale AI long before amid a clash with Wang but had retained a 5 percent stake. Today, she’s most influential as a force in the creator economy, which is increasingly challenging Hollywood for the world’s attention. In addition to being a full-fledged influencer herself — her Insta is a concatenation of FOMO fodder, from private jets to courtside at Lakers games — she founded the content monetization platform Passes, which allows for direct engagement with followers. (Think OnlyFans without the nudity.)

• Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin

  

  Leaders, Center for Humane Technology

  If you’re in Hollywood looking for a bulwark against AI — heck, if you’re in any human realm looking for a bulwark against AI — you pretty much will run into Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin. The co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology have been some of the most forceful and public advocates against turning over society to the machine brain. (If you saw the recent The AI Doc, you’ll already be familiar.) What’s more, their street cred is unmatched: Harris is a former design ethicist at Google (and has “explored the influences that hijack human attitudes, behaviors and beliefs,” a topic he would present on inside Google itself. Raskin, meanwhile, co-hosts a podcast on the topic called Your Undivided Attention, with plenty of entrepreneurship under his belt as well as the Earth Species Project, a nonprofit dedicated to translating animal communication that he co-founded. Expect to hear their names over and over as this all unfolds.

• Amit Jain

  

  Executive, Luma AI

  Luma is building models faster than people can use them, and Jain is talking about them faster than people can listen. One of the startup video generation companies with ambitions and promises to match, Luma has willed itself into the entertainment and content worlds with sheer relentlessness (also money; it recently closed a $900 million financing deal anchored by the Saudi government). Where Luma’s models will play — in Hollywood, on Madison Avenue, in the influencer world, or somewhere else — remains to be seen. But it’s becoming harder to ignore Jain and his millennial Silicon Valley swagger, like when he told a THR-led panel at the Toronto International Film Festival that he didn’t really think slop was a thing or would slow down quality, any more than a thousand blog posts slow down The New Yorker. In a set of responses to THR this spring, he was more tactful, saying that AI shouldn’t be listed in credits even if it played a big role in what we see on the screen. “We don’t credit After Effects for a visual effect, or Microsoft Word for a screenplay. Credits are for the human architects.” He says he’s firmly in the camp that AI shouldn’t be used to generate ideas, just execute them. AI doesn’t replace the artist; it replaces the grind. But he pushes back on Will Arnett’s Oscar stage comments that “Tonight, we are celebrating people, not AI, because animation, it’s more than a prompt.” Counters Jain: “He’s right. Animation is a labor of love — but “prompting” is a reductive way to describe the future. Creative [AI] professionals aren’t simply typing words; they are directing light, physics and emotion of a scene.”

• Daniel Kwan, Natasha Lyonne and Joseph Gordon-Levitt

  

  Activists, filmmakers and actors

  It began with a dire warning — and a call to arms. In a 2025 panel discussion, Daniel Kwan, one half of the directorial tandem behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, set the existential stakes. “We have to understand that AI is fundamentally incompatible with our institutions,” said Kwan, who called on studios, unions, agencies — “basically everyone” — to form “a unified front against the tech industry.” In February, he co-founded Creators Coalition on AI, alongside actors and prominent AI activists Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Natasha Lyonne, to regulate the new technology and advocate for artists’ rights. Hollywood creatives were quick to voice their support, including Cate Blanchett, Rian Johnson, Phil Lord, Kristen Stewart and Taika Waititi. The CCAI says it’s not resisting the use of AI but rather its misuse. Lyonne herself, acknowledging the inevitability of the tech, co-founded AI company Asteria and has announced plans to direct an AI-assisted feature film, Uncanny Valley. Gordon-Levitt, for his part, has become the organization’s most public spokesperson (the U.N. appointed him as its first global advocate for human-centric digital governance). “I actually think this technology has the potential to be genuinely good for human creativity, but we’ll need to come together and build robust systems for ongoing consent, compensation, controls and transparency around AI training data,” he tells THR. “[But] I fear that most gen AI won’t be used as a tool by human creators at all. Mostly, it’ll be used [by big tech companies] for purely algorithmic personalization … to generate a whole new video just for you. Everyone will have their own unique viewing experience. Or, put another way, every user will be perfectly siloed, relating to no one, connected to nothing but the system alone.”

• Mira Lane

  

  Executive, Google

  Google isn’t typically the place one thinks of when the subjects of storytelling and creative expression come to mind. But Lane isn’t typical Google. The vp and founder of the company’s “Envisioning Studio,” Lane’s job is to bring together tech and art people to figure out how to maximize possibilities for AI and other new tech. She helped guide Ancestra, for instance, the Eliza McNitt-directed, Darren Aronofsky-produced film made with Veo generations that premiered at Tribeca last year. A poet and ceramicist, Lane founded the Ethics & Society group at Microsoft. If AI is going to work for creatives in Hollywood, it will happen because tech execs like Lane are listening — and arguing their case internally. “I don’t believe that AI can replicate the core of human introspection and intent. Technology cannot feel the ‘why’ behind a creative choice,” she says. “At the end of the day, audiences don’t fall in love with technology — they fall in love with stories and the people behind them.”

• Zack “Gossip Goblin” London

  

  AI creator

  What you do get when you throw the baroque imaginations of Terry Gilliam, Ridley Scott, Guillermo del Toro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet into an AI blender and keep adjusting the ingredients until you get it just right? The growing oeuvre of Gossip Goblin, an AI filmmaker whose phantasmagoric shorts have earned him more than 1 million followers on Instagram and millions more views across platforms, is perhaps the best evidence yet for the argument that generative AI can be art — as long there’s a true artist behind it. Gossip Goblin is the nom-de-LLM of Zack London, a 35-year-old Los Angeles native who studied sculpture and anthropology at Pitzer College, did a Fulbright in Malaysia, backpacked Southeast Asia and eventually landed in product design and VR work at Facebook’s Oculus division before relocating to Stockholm for love. It was there, messing around with early image-generation tools after hours, that he stumbled on to what may amount to a new cinematic language. He’s received calls from most major studios and streamers and has since quit his day job, raised funding and launched a studio to produce longer AI-driven films with a small international team. “Right now, AI filmmaking is about refusing the default,” he told THR’s Seth Abramovitch, explaining what separates his work from the slop that’s flooding the platforms. “The technology has a baseline aesthetic, and if you just accept it, you end up with everything else.”

• Matt Stone and Trey Parker

  

  Filmmakers, entrepreneurs

  You think of them as the guys who keep killing Kenny and blaming Canada. They are, but Stone and Parker also have become something else: low-key AI pioneers. The duo have been running Venice-based AI company Deep Voodoo for six years — an eternity in tech terms. Where many such studios train their models on unlicensed content to make models available to any slop generator in sight, Voodoo offers mainly bespoke models for individual high-end creatives and production houses. The result is a host of cool — and ethical — stuff like shape-shifting Kendrick videos and a de-aged Bill Clinton on Ted. Stone believes this is the future of AI in Hollywood: models that enhance and even produce new art. “Somebody’s going to make a scary fucking horror movie using this technology. Somebody’s going to make a really fucking funny comedy using this,” he says.

• Neal Mohan

  

  CEO, YouTube

  YouTube is TV now. And not just because its bottomless content — ranging from brain rot to high art — draws more eyeballs than any other platform or network. But also because more Americans now watch YouTube on their TV sets than on their phones. So when Mohan, a Stanford MBA who rose up the Google ranks to become CEO in 2023, says stuff like, “The next frontier for YouTube is AI,” as he did in a memo to employees in October, that’s surely got the rival streamers and studios scrambling to catch up. In the past few months, YouTube has released generative AI tools for creators to zhuzh up their content or even produce videos or music wholesale from text prompts. More to Hollywood’s liking, the streaming giant has just announced it is combatting deepfakes by allowing celebrities to control their likeness on the platform (including by monetizing it if they want). “I think what skeptics get wrong is that AI will replace human creativity,” says Mohan. “That will remain critical. What they get right, though, is the need for guardrails. We have to be incredibly intentional about likeness, copyright and transparency if we want this technology.” The CEO says one of YouTube’s main objectives for 2026 is rooting out AI slop — however you define it — and elevating quality content. The most promising aspect of AI, he says, “is the democratization of high-end production. A person with a phone will soon have the state-of-the-art editing and production tools in her pocket, allowing creativity to rise and gain traction regardless of the budget. That’s a game-changer for creators.”

• Kevin Reilly

  

  Executive, Kartel AI

  What do you do after you greenlight The Office? If you’re Reilly, who in addition to heading entertainment for NBC also did the same at Fox and HBO Max, the answer is clear: You run an AI company. Reilly is chief executive at Kartel, a firm that seeks to help traditional media firms make the AI transition. Few people in the tech world can speak their language like Reilly does. It’s a transition he says is happening whether we’re ready or not. “Volume content [streaming, localized variants, advertising and promo] will go AI-led faster than anyone will admit” — though he does worry about the “commoditization of mediocrity at scale.” But there’s a distinction, he believes: “Prestige filmmaking will stay largely human-governed, not out of craft pride but because audiences will pay more for it.” As for the naysayers? “We’ve been to this movie before. This industry resists every new medium and method until it’s rescued by it. The question is always the same: Are you building for the world that’s coming or defending the world that’s leaving?”

• Edward Saatchi

  

  Executive, Fable

  If you’re looking to make a splash in Hollywood and get everyone talking (and many people mad), one way to go about it might be to create an AI platform called Showrunner and say you can use it to do what a lot of humans typically do. Another way would be to take an Orson Welles classic and use AI to complete/revamp it in a way you say the filmmaker would have done it himself. Or you can be like Saatchi and do both of those things. So it goes for the British American entrepreneur, who spent years working on virtual reality entertainment before pivoting to AI at the San Francisco company he runs, Fable. Saatchi says he’s not trying to take anyone’s job nor provoke them — he just wants to push the tech as far as he can and see what kind of storytelling emerges. Saatchi continues the provocation by telling THR that he believes in the coming years, human-led, AI-led and hybrid entertainment “will end up one-third, one-third, one-third.” He says that the AI entertainment will be subversive — but only if we hold a certain type of conservative beliefs. “An auteur will make a movie [in the AI age], and people will make millions of their own scenes in the world of the story, hundreds of episodes, tens of new movies, some of which may be better than the original.” he says. “If you have an anarchic tilt, then that subversion is the best thing AI can contribute. If you love your Pasolini, Fassbinder, Cassavetes, that’s horrifying and the worst thing.”

• Amar Subramanya

  Executive, Apple

  What happens when Hollywood’s most important tech giant has to play catch-up on AI? That’s the challenge faced by Subramanya, a Google and Microsoft veteran who was just named vp AI at Apple, replacing longtime head John Giannandrea. Hollywood needs Apple for a host of purposes, as its devices are the primary way many consumers interact with their products. Not to mention Apple Studios, of course a perennial employer of Hollywood talent. How Subramanya integrates AI into the former could determine how essential Apple continues to be as an entertainment platform, while the success of its AI strategy at the latter could be a key determinant of whether filmmakers head there or somewhere else. Oh, and the AI chief just got a new boss in incoming Apple CEO John Ternus. Uncertain but crucial times ahead.

• Nikola Todorovic

  

  Executive, Wonder Dynamics

  In 2016, the Bosnia-born filmmaker and his friend, actor Tye Sheridan (The Tree of Life), ran into the kind of budget realities that have dashed many a Hollywood dream. “Tye and I were writing scripts we knew would cost $100 million to make, and there was no realistic path to getting them produced,” Todorovic tells THR. “That gap between imagination and execution” got them thinking about how to harness the promise of AI — six years before the generative AI gold rush. Around the same time, Sheridan was starring in Steven Spielberg’s mocap-heavy Ready Player One, which gave him and Todorovic firsthand experience with the most advanced VFX tech of the time. The two co-founded Wonder Dynamics with the goal of automating VFX tasks like motion capture and camera tracking and received seed funding from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. In 2024, the company was acquired by creative software giant Autodesk. Like most advocates of AI these days, Todorovic emphasizes the necessity of human storytellers but touts the technology’s potential to democratize filmmaking by lowering barriers to entry: “Right now, you still need permission to make something, whether that’s from a studio, a producer or a distributor. What AI starts to unlock is a more permissionless form of storytelling, where more people can actually bring their ideas to life without waiting for that gatekeeping layer.”

• Cristóbal Valenzuela

  

  Executive, Runway AI

  The field of AI filmmaking is only a few years old, but Valenzuela feels like he’s been practicing it for decades. The founder of New York model specialists Runway AI, Valenzuela leveraged his education at NYU’s tech arts program into a company that has become a go-to for many studios. Asked what element of filmmaking couldn’t be done acceptably with AI, he says: “None. That’s not a provocation. It’s where the technology is heading.” Officially making a deal with Lionsgate and Harmony Korine, the firm has informal partnerships with many other entertainment companies, not to mention running an annual film festival and a summit aimed at creatives. Valenzuela isn’t shy about how AI can and will be part of the process: “The biggest mistake skeptics make is judging a new medium by the standards of the old one. AI isn’t a better or faster version of filmmaking; it’s an entirely new medium of expression. We made the same mistake with film. Painters didn’t recognize it as art because it wasn’t painting. History is repeating itself.” He minces no words: “The transition will be disruptive, and not everyone will make it through.”

• Alexandr Wang

  

  Executive, Meta

  Unlike other Silicon Valley figures on this list, Wang does not have explicit designs on Hollywood. But as the chief AI officer at Meta, which has commandeered vast swaths of our attention away from film and TV thanks to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, he certainly has Hollywood’s attention. Born to Chinese immigrants in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1997, Wang dropped out of MIT at 19 to co-found Scale AI — a data infrastructure company useful in training large language models — and at 24 became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, according to Forbes, though Scale under Wang was tainted by a 2024 lawsuit alleging wage theft and worker exploitation, allegations Wang has denied. After acquiring a large stake in Scale AI, Meta hired Wang to lead its superintelligence efforts in 2025. The company’s previous AI chief, widely respected Turing Prize winner Yann LeCun, stepped down, criticizing Wang as inexperienced. Wang’s shaky early tenure — with layoffs and reports of dissension in the ranks — has proved LeCun right. But given that Wang’s in charge of the means through which billions interact with AI day-to-day, his influence on an all on-screen content cannot be discounted.

  This story appears in The Hollywood Reporter’s AI Issue. Click here to read more.

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