HITS

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the media and entertainment industry has revolutionized the way content is created, managed and distributed, according to Brajesh Jha, SVP and global head of media, publishing and entertainment at Genpact, and other industry executives who spoke May 23 at the Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS) at The Culver Theater, during  the panel session “Workflow on Espresso: AI & Smart Content’s Impact on M+E Workflow.”

AI and smart content technologies have become a crucial part of the industry, changing traditional workflows and creating new opportunities.

During the HITS session, panelists discussed the impact of advanced computing, generative AI and metadata-driven supply chains in the industry, including how they  transformed workflow and the challenges and opportunities associated with those technologies as the industry’s landscape continues to transform.

“I am super excited about this session because I think [for] anyone who’s in the trenches, this is really important to this revolution and evolution that’s happening, not just in media and entertainment but in a lot of other industries with their smart content and data, automation and AI,” moderator Mary Yurkovic, director of MESA’s Smart Content Council, said at the start of the session.

“Obviously I think the big accelerator was this paper that was released in 2017 called “Everything is All You Need” about this algorithm around this transformer, according to Fortify Media CEO Steve Cronan.  “Everybody I knew that was kind of near AI was like, ‘Holy moly, this is a game changer.’ And, as people sort of dove in, I think the combination of compute and investment and a whole range of other topics or other components” has made it almost feel like, before, everybody was “driving in second gear [but] we just hopped in a rocket ship and the acceleration now of information and the opportunity is more exciting than ever,” he said.

He added that, “with the evolution of these algorithms and now the attention that it’s getting, obviously the acceleration of both the technology and opportunities” has continued further.

That is an “excellent point,” Jha said. Before generative AI, “artificial intelligence was predominantly focused on the predictive side of things,” he noted. Initially, the “compute power was just not there,” he said.

Providing an example, he said NVIDIA recently provided a “very simple example of how compute power has democratized the usage of artificial intelligence and large learning models.”

Jha added: “If you think about it . . . if you were a CIO say from five years ago, you would have spent a billion dollars for a typical data center with all kinds of technologies and compute power. You can now do that for less than a hundred million dollars in the cloud.” It had taken $2 million-$3 million to design a chip and about $100 million to get it manufactured, he noted.

But he said: “When it is running in the cloud, you can run your large language models . . . for hardly $10 [million] to $20 million.”

Also among the expert speakers was Thomas Stilling, course creator and instructor at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information and digital product and transformation leader.

The Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit event was produced by MESA in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and presented by Amazon Studios Technology, with sponsorship by Fortinet, Genpact, Prime Focus Technologies, Signiant, Softtek, Convergent, Gracenote, Altman Solon, AppTek, Ascendion, CoreSite, EPAM, MicroStrategy, Veritone, CDSA, EIDR and PDG Consulting.