Hollywood
Winfrey, Knowles, Shakira in Forbes list of powerful women
NEW DELHI: Actor-presenter Oprah Winfrey and singer Beyonce Knowles have once again made it to the Forbes list of ‘The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.’
While Wifrey is at number 14, Knowles is at number 17, just ahead of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at 18.
PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi is placed at 13 (as against 10 last year) while Cisco Systems chief technology and strategy officer Padmasree Warrior is at 71 (against 57 last year).
Actor Angelina Jolie is at number 50 and has fallen from last year’s ranking of 37.
Other prominent women from the media and entertainment industry in the list are Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chairperson Amy Pascal at 28, actress Sofia Vergara at 32, NBC Universal chairperson Bonnie Hammer at 42, TV Personality and comedienne Ellen DeGeneres at 46, Huffington Post editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington at 52, singers Shakira Mebarak at 48 and Lady Gaga at 67 and Chinese actress Yao Chen at 83.
Hollywood
Utopai Studios partners Huace to deploy PAI for long form content
Deal includes revenue sharing as Huace adopts AI engine across global ops
MUMBAI: Lights, camera… algorithm, the script just got a silicon co-writer. In a move that signals how storytelling itself is being re-engineered, U.S.-based Utopai Studios has partnered China’s Huace Film & TV Co. Ltd. to bring artificial general intelligence into the heart of long-form content creation.
At the centre of the deal is PAI, Utopai’s cinematic storytelling system, which Huace will deploy as a core engine across its production pipeline from development and creative iteration to global localisation. The partnership includes a large-scale annual usage commitment from Huace, alongside a usage-based revenue-sharing model, underscoring both ambition and commercial confidence on both sides.
For Huace, one of China’s largest film and television companies, the bet is not on automation alone but on scale with control. With distribution spanning over 200 countries and a presence across more than 20 international platforms, including Netflix and YouTube, the company brings a vast content ecosystem where even marginal efficiency gains can translate into significant output shifts. Its extensive TV IP library further positions it as fertile ground for AI-assisted storytelling workflows.
The choice of PAI follows what Huace described as a rigorous evaluation of existing AI tools, many of which remain limited to fragmented use cases such as video generation or editing. What tipped the scales, according to the company, was PAI’s ability to handle long-form narrative complexity maintaining continuity, structure, and creative coherence across entire story arcs rather than isolated clips.
Utopai, for its part, is using the partnership to anchor its international expansion strategy, pitching PAI as an enterprise-ready system built for customisation, privacy, and regulatory adaptability across markets. That positioning becomes particularly relevant as global media companies increasingly scrutinise how AI integrates into proprietary workflows.
The timing is notable. Earlier this month, Utopai upgraded PAI to support three-minute 4K video generation and advanced multi-shot sequencing features designed to tackle one of AI storytelling’s biggest hurdles: consistency across scenes.
What emerges is not just another tech collaboration, but a glimpse into how the grammar of filmmaking could evolve. Because if stories were once crafted frame by frame, the next chapter might just be coded scene by scene.
