ByteDance’s AI Ambitions Are Being Hampered by Compute Restraints and Copyright Concerns | EUROtoday

Move over Sora 2, there’s a scorching 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 considered the know-how primarily as a option to produce slop.

Feng Ji, the founding father of Game Science, the studio that developed China’s world hit online game Black Myth: Wukongwrote 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 rules and content material moderation techniques. Pan Tianhong, who leads a Chinese skilled video manufacturing studio with over 15 million followers on social media, posted a video through which he stated Seedance 2.0 is considerably higher than any video-making fashions that got here earlier than it. “It thinks like a director,” Pan stated.

However, 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 simply permitting current customers of its consumer-facing AI apps in China—the most well-liked 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 home market solely, stopping folks outdoors the nation from testing the mannequin themselves. (The restrictions have prompted some savvy folks in China to resell their ByteDance accounts to keen early AI adopters abroad.)

But there are indicators that the mannequin would possibly develop into 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 might generate proper now, would price barely greater than $2 to make, Chinese 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, writer of the Substack publication Concurrent and an in depth observer of the US-China AI panorama, tells me that Seedance 2.0 is one other fascinating instance of how the 2 international locations have taken diverging paths. Even earlier than the discharge of Seedance 2.0, a few of the most established video-making AI instruments on this planet, comparable to Kling AI, have been developed by Chinese corporations. “​​China hasn’t produced any decent AI coding tool, which is why Chinese people are all dependent on Claude Code or Codex; but when it comes to video AI, China is miles ahead of the US,” Wang says.

But all of the hype apart, Seedance is working into two critical issues. Weeks into its launch, ByteDance is dealing with a compute bottleneck that’s inflicting the mannequin to take hours to generate a single video. Meanwhile, 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 didn’t instantly return a request for remark.

The Bandwidth Problem

Even for those who get entry to a ByteDance AI app, it’s nonetheless removed from straightforward to generate a video with Seedance 2.0, as a result of too many individuals try to do the identical factor, and ByteDance has but to offer sufficient compute assets for everybody.

When I attempted to create a clip with considered one of ByteDance’s apps this week, it advised me that I used to be quantity 90,985 within the queue, and it might take about 4 hours to generate a five-second video. After ready for 2 hours, the app advised me I now had six extra to go. At that time, I made a decision to only go to mattress.