Moving over Sora 2A new AI video is in town.
Early February is the best time to start planning for your trip. ByteDance Unveiled Seedance 2.0. This major update to the company’s flagship video model had been largely obscure. His powerful capabilities shocked China’s AI community, shocking even those who were skeptical about AI-generated videos.
Feng Ji founded Game Science in China, the studio responsible for the global success of China’s video game. Black Myth: WukongHe wrote on the internet that he is “deeply shocked” Seedance 2.0’s capabilities impressed him and he believed it would challenge China’s existing copyright regulations, as well as its content moderation system. Pan Tianhong who runs a Chinese video production company with more than 15 million social media followers, made a video where he claimed that Seedance 2.0 was better than previous video making models. “It thinks like a director,” Pan Said
Currently, access to this model remains restricted. As of this week, ByteDance is only allowing existing users of its consumer-facing AI apps in China—the most popular one is the chatbot app Doubao, but the company also has a confusing constellation of lesser-known apps like Jimeng, Xiaoyunque, and Spark—to experience Seedance 2.0. The apps can only be used in the Chinese market, which prevents people living outside China from trying out the new model. The restrictions in China have led some smart people to sell their ByteDance account to early AI adopters abroad.
There are some signs that this model could become more affordable soon. ByteDance revealed its proposed Seedance 2.0 pricing this week. The 15-second videos, which are the most it is capable of producing, cost slightly less than $2. IT Home estimated. ByteDance hasn’t yet opened its API to developers from other companies, but this should happen soon.
Afra A. Wang is the editor of Substack, a newsletter. Concurrent As a long-time observer of US-China AI, I find Seedance 2.0 to be another good example of two different paths that the countries have chosen. Before Seedance 2.0 was released, Kling AI and other video-making AI software were already well established. were developed by Chinese companies. “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.
Seedance has two major problems, despite all of the hype. ByteDance’s compute bottleneck has caused the model, weeks after its launch, to take up to an hour to create a single video. Disney, Netflix, Paramount and other major studios have also sent ByteDance cease and desist letters, alleging the outputs of Seedance 2.0 infringe their copyrighted materials. ByteDance didn’t immediately respond to a comment request.
Bandwidth Problem
It’s not easy to create a video using Seedance 2.0 even if you have access to a ByteDance AI application. Too many people want to do the exact same thing and ByteDance does not yet provide enough computing resources to everyone.
It took me four hours and 90,985 people to make a 5-second clip using one of ByteDance apps. After two hours of waiting, I was told that there were six minutes left. The app told me I had six more hours to go.
