Chinese companies lead US rivals in AI video generation, report says

In short: Chinese tech groups are pulling ahead of US rivals at making videos with AI, according to developers and user rankings.

What's going on

Chinese companies such as ByteDance and Kuaishou are seeing strong results in “video generation” tools, which create video from text or images. People who build products with these tools say Chinese models are often more realistic and easier to use than US options.

One reason is training data. To learn how video should look and move, an AI model needs huge amounts of footage, like showing a student many examples before a test. ByteDance and Kuaishou own major short-video platforms, including TikTok and Kuaishou, which gives them large video libraries to learn from.

In user-voted rankings on an independent platform called Arena, tools including Kuaishou’s Kling and ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 scored highly. Google’s Veo 3 is also seen as competitive, partly because Google can learn from YouTube footage, but developers say it has stricter content limits.

What to watch

This matters because AI video is already being used for ads, online shopping, and entertainment. Some companies say they can now create large numbers of product videos quickly, which would be too expensive to film by hand.

There are also open questions about rights and safety. The report notes concerns about copyrighted material being used in training, and ByteDance has faced legal threats over videos that resemble well-known characters. Another factor is cost, since making video with AI uses much more computing power than text, which can limit how widely these tools can be offered.

Source: Financial Times