By Eduardo Baptista
ByteDance’s new video-generating artificial intelligence model has already impressed the likes of Elon Musk and gone viral in China, where it has been compared to DeepSeek and won praise for its ability to produce cinematic storylines with just a few prompts.
While text-centric AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DeepSeek’s R1 have become widely adopted, models specialising in generating videos and pictures represent the next frontier in the technology’s potential for disruption.
ByteDance, which officially unveiled Seedance 2.0 on Thursday, said that the system is designed for professional film, e-commerce, and advertising productions, because it is capable of processing text, images, audio, and video simultaneously, lowering the cost of creating content.
The product launch comes as China and investors worldwide are on the lookout for a successor to Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s R1 and V3 models whose global debut early in 2025 triggered a systemic shock.
Next level ‘Sputnik moment’
On Chinese social media, Seedance 2.0 drew comparisons to DeepSeek’s meteoric rise to fame.
“Early last year, the release of DeepSeek-R1 sparked heated debate in the US tech community over a ‘Sputnik moment’,” Chinese state-backed newspaper Global Times wrote in an editorial on Wednesday.
“This year, the continued breakout success of Seedance 2.0 and similar innovations has gone even further, giving rise to a wave of admiration for China within Silicon Valley.”
Tens of millions of hashtag clicks
The buzz generated by Seedance 2.0 was underscored when the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, replied to a post praising the model on his social media platform, X, by commenting, “It’s happening fast”. Users on China’s Weibo microblogging platform shared videos generated by the AI model that showcased the complexity and image quality of its output, no matter how bizarre the prompt.
One two-minute video, which had been viewed about a million times on Weibo, depicted rapper and record producer Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and reality TV star Kim Kardashian, as characters in a palace drama set in Imperial China, speaking and singing in Mandarin.
Hashtags related to Seedance 2.0 have racked up tens of millions of clicks on Weibo, including one from state-owned newspaper Beijing Daily that read “from DeepSeek to Seedance, China’s AI has succeeded”.
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