A new AI model for video creation from TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has caused a stir in China and even caught the attention of Elon Musk. Users are drawing parallels with DeepSeek’s success, admiring how easily the neural network can turn short prompts into full-fledged cinematic stories.
A new AI model for video creation from TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has caused a stir in China and even caught the attention of Elon Musk. Users are drawing parallels with DeepSeek’s success, admiring how easily the neural network can turn short prompts into full-fledged cinematic stories.
ByteDance says Seedance 2.0 is designed for professional film production, e-commerce and advertising. With the ability to simultaneously process text, images, audio and video, the model significantly reduces the cost of content creation, Reuters writes .
The product launch comes as China and investors around the world are searching for a successor to the R1 and V3 models of Chinese startup DeepSeek, whose global debut in early 2025 literally shook the global market . On Chinese social media, Seedance 2.0 is already being compared to DeepSeek in terms of its rapid rise to popularity.
“Early last year, the release of DeepSeek-R1 sparked heated discussions in the U.S. tech community about a ‘Satellite moment,’” the Chinese state-run Global Times newspaper reported. “This year, the subsequent wild success of Seedance 2.0 and similar innovations has gone even further, sparking a wave of admiration for China in Silicon Valley.”
Elon Musk also added to the hype surrounding Seedance 2.0. On his social network X, he responded to a post praising the model with a brief comment: "This is happening fast."
Users of the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo shared videos created by this AI model, demonstrating the complexity and high image quality, no matter how strange or bizarre the textual query.
One 2-minute video, which garnered nearly a million views on Weibo, depicted rapper and producer Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and reality star Kim Kardashian as characters in a historical drama set in imperial China, speaking and singing in Mandarin.
Hashtags related to Seedance 2.0 have garnered tens of millions of clicks on Weibo, including a tag from the state-run Beijing Daily newspaper that proclaimed: “From DeepSeek to Seedance — Chinese AI has won.”
The capabilities of Seedance 2.0 can be seen in the video above, created by American AI Filmmaker Heydin.
“This is my first experience with Seedance 2.0, and judging by the first experiments, it is one of the most impressive AI models for video generation that I have tried to date. The dynamics of the movements look very smooth, the model clearly follows the prompts, and the efficiency is simply amazing - there is almost no need to do re-generation. Each clip in this video was created based on only one reference image and one query. I also ran a test with a 3x3 image grid without any text prompt at all - and the result remained stable. Another interesting detail: the sound design is already built into the system, and it works really cool,” Heydin shared.
Recall that ByteDance intends to produce its own AI chips . To this end, the Chinese company is in talks with Samsung Electronics.
