Transfer over Sora 2, there’s a sizzling new AI video mannequin on the town.
In early February, ByteDance unveiled Seedance 2.0, a serious improve to its flagship video mannequin, which had beforehand remained pretty obscure. Its highly effective capabilities instantly shocked the AI ecosystem in China, even amongst audiences who had as soon as been skeptical of AI-generated video and seen the expertise primarily as a means to produce slop.
Feng Ji, the founding father of Sport Science, the studio that developed China’s international hit online game Black Myth: Wukong, wrote on-line that he was “deeply shocked” by the mannequin’s talents and believed Seedance 2.0 would pose important challenges to China’s present copyright laws and content material moderation programs. Pan Tianhong, who leads a Chinese language skilled video manufacturing studio with over 15 million followers on social media, posted a video wherein he stated Seedance 2.0 is considerably higher than any video-making fashions that got here before it. “It thinks like a director,” Pan stated.
Nonetheless, most individuals can’t get their fingers on the mannequin at this second as a result of entry stays pretty restricted. As of this week, ByteDance is solely permitting current customers of its consumer-facing AI apps in China—the hottest one is the chatbot app Doubao, however the firm additionally has a complicated constellation of lesser-known apps like Jimeng, Xiaoyunque, and Spark—to expertise Seedance 2.0. All these apps are for the Chinese language home market solely, stopping individuals outdoors the nation from testing the mannequin themselves. (The restrictions have prompted some savvy individuals in China to resell their ByteDance accounts to keen early AI adopters abroad.)
However there are indicators that the mannequin may turn out to be extra accessible quickly. This week, ByteDance up to date its API platform and disclosed the proposed pricing of Seedance 2.0: A 15-second video, the longest it will probably generate proper now, would price barely greater than $2 to make, Chinese language publication IT Home estimated. ByteDance nonetheless hasn’t opened up API entry to third-party builders, however that ought to be on the horizon.
Afra Wang, creator of the Substack publication Concurrent and a detailed observer of the US-China AI panorama, tells me that Seedance 2.0 is one other attention-grabbing instance of how the two international locations have taken diverging paths. Even before the launch of Seedance 2.0, a few of the most established video-making AI instruments in the world, similar to Kling AI, were developed by Chinese companies. “China hasn’t produced any respectable AI coding instrument, which is why Chinese language individuals are all dependent on Claude Code or Codex; however when it comes to video AI, China is miles forward of the US,” Wang says.
However all the hype apart, Seedance is operating into two critical issues. Weeks into its launch, ByteDance is dealing with a compute bottleneck that is inflicting the mannequin to take hours to generate a single video. In the meantime, main film studios, together with Disney, Netflix, and Paramount, have all despatched ByteDance cease-and-desist letters alleging that Seedance 2.0’s outputs are infringing on their copyrighted works. ByteDance did not instantly return a request for remark.
The Bandwidth Drawback
Even should you get entry to a ByteDance AI app, it’s nonetheless far from straightforward to generate a video with Seedance 2.0, as a result of too many individuals are making an attempt to do the identical factor, and ByteDance has but to present sufficient compute assets for everybody.
After I tried to create a clip with certainly one of ByteDance’s apps this week, it instructed me that I used to be quantity 90,985 in the queue, and it could take about 4 hours to generate a five-second video. After ready for 2 hours, the app instructed me I now had six extra to go. At that time, I made a decision to simply go to mattress.
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