Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee believes the modest clout of the premier awards for Chinese-language films will grow as the market for such films increases.
The Taiwanese filmmaker spoke Tuesday in Taipei ahead of next week's 50th annual Golden Horse Awards, which showcases films from Taiwan, mainland China, Singapore and Hong Kong. The event is the equivalent of the Oscars, and Lee will be a juror selecting winners in 22 categories, ranging from Best Feature Film to Best Action Choreography.
Asked about Hollywood's relative indifference to the Golden Horse event, Lee says that will change as the market for Chinese films grows.
"I think in 10 years' time our market is bigger than the Hollywood market," he said. "So it comes naturally."
While the Golden Horse event is a staple for Asian film fans, with glitzy local television coverage and legions of screaming fans blanketing the award venue to get a close look at their favorite stars, it has little impact outside the region. A-list Hollywood personalities almost never attend, and few films showcased here make a splash in theaters outside of Asia.
Still, Lee said, it was not necessary for the Golden Horse Awards to do anything special to make a bigger impact in Hollywood, because "Chinese-speaking people are probably four times more than English-speaking people."
"I think as long as we're influential in the Chinese-speaking world it will prevail, it will ripple out," he said of the awards, adding that while the Golden Horse event will likely have its ups and downs "eventually, I think it will get picked up."
This year's Golden Horse awards are scheduled to be distributed Nov. 23.
OpenAI files confidential SEC paperwork for IPO, opening the door to a Wall Street debut
ChatGPT maker OpenAI filed preliminary paperwork that would open the door to it becoming a publicly traded company, the third in a powerhouse trio of artificial intelligence companies racing to Wall Street debuts.
The San Francisco-based company said Monday it has filed confidential paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
"We expect it to leak so we're just announcing it," the company said in a statement. "We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it's a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best."
OpenAI's move follows its rival Anthropic's June 1 disclosure that it is also moving toward an initial public offering of shares. Both are now following Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX, which has started an IPO roadshow pitching itself as an AI-focused space company.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman first publicly floated the possibility of an IPO last fall, describing it as the "most likely path" for the company given its size and the need for vast amounts of capital to advance its technology.
OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the common good and is now a company valued at $852 billion.
The filing comes at a "precarious moment" for OpenAI as it appears to be losing ChatGPT's strong early leads with consumers and businesses to Google and Anthropic, said Emarketer analyst Nate Elliott.
"But OpenAI doesn't have a lot of other places to look for the enormous capital required to support its costs," Elliott said.
Paving the way for going public was OpenAI's decision last year to reorganize its business structure and... Read More