The Tamesis
China’s artificial intelligence industry is buzzing with activity this week.
On Thursday, TikTok parent company ByteDance released a new video-generating artificial intelligence model that immediately caused a stir in China.
A hashtag associated with the model – Seedance 2.0 – has received tens of millions of hits on Weibo, the Chinese microblogging platform.
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Reuters report Users share videos generated by AI models that demonstrate the sophistication and image quality of their output, no matter how bizarre the prompts. The model has also won praise for its ability to create movie storylines with just a few hints.
A 2-minute clip purportedly produced by the model features rappers Ye (ex-Kanye West) and Kim Kardashian singing in Mandarin in a Chinese court drama. Reached 1 million views.
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Discussion around Seedance 2.0 peaked when billionaire tech tycoon Elon Musk emerged Replied to a post praised the model on his social media platform X, commenting: “It happened very quickly.”
The craze for the model has also prompted some to compare it to DeepSeek, the Chinese open-source ChatGPT rival that shocked global AI makers a year ago.
For example, state-owned newspaper Beijing Daily noted: “From DeepSeek to Seedance, China’s artificial intelligence has been successful.”
Another state-run newspaper, the Global Times, wrote in an editorial that “the continued breakthrough success of Seedance 2.0 and similar innovations goes further than DeepSeek’s success last year” and “set off a wave of admiration for China in Silicon Valley.”
A range of products to be launched soon
Chinese media are portraying Seedance as another “breakthrough” in line with Beijing’s lofty ambitions to position itself as a global leader in artificial intelligence.
While text-centric AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DeepSeek’s R1, have been widely adopted, models that specialize in generating videos and images represent the next frontier in the technology’s disruptive potential.
ByteDance is not the only company vying for the artificial intelligence market.
Wednesday, Zhipu AI Release the latest AI modelwhich is said to have enhanced coding capabilities and the ability to perform long-running tasks without any user prompts.
Many other Chinese companies are also preparing to launch new models, some with more consumer appeal, aiming to surpass DeepSeek’s success.
According to ReutersSome of these companies launch new products around the Lunar New Year, China’s longest and busiest holiday, which officially begins on February 15.
One of them is internet giant Alibaba, which is expected to launch the Qwen 3.5 series during the holidays. The model has improved mathematical reasoning and coding capabilities, tech industry news site The Information reported last month.
The company also plans to spend heavily $431 million to promote its Qwen AI application during the holidays.
DeepSeek is also preparing to release its next-generation model V4 with powerful coding capabilities in mid-February.
China’s open source dominance
Over the past two years, DeepSeek’s models have repeatedly undercut competitors, making the cost of use significantly lower than many U.S. products.
Actually, a report A RAND Corporation study released last month on the U.S.-China competition in artificial intelligence found that Chinese models cost about one-sixth to one-quarter of the operating costs of comparable U.S. systems.
“DeepSeek shows the industry that you can create a very good model even with limited resources,” Lian Jye Su, principal analyst at technology research firm Omdia, told Reuters.
“The combination of open source access, powerful inference capabilities and low deployment costs has become the defining model for how Chinese vendors now approach base models.”
Before DeepSeek’s breakthrough, some Chinese industry leaders, including Baidu CEO Robin Li, had believed that closed-source systems would dominate.
But within days of DeepSeek’s assistant being more downloaded than ChatGPT in the U.S. Apple App Store, Baidu and other leading companies began opening up some of their own models.
As of now, the open source artificial intelligence repository Hugging Face is mainly released by Chinese technology giants such as Baidu, ByteDance, and Tencent, as well as startups such as Moonshot. Nine of the top ten models are on the list on the repository All Chinese [as of Feb 13, 1300 GMT].
According to the Washington Post Last year, Chinese companies’ open source models are also now more popular and powerful than their American counterparts.
“Chinese companies’ active embrace of open source has greatly lowered the threshold for global developers and companies to access cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology,” the Global Times wrote in an editorial praising Seedance 2.0 on Wednesday.
“High expectations”
Many Chinese AI giants are also moving away from the goal of improving the performance of their core models and instead focusing on integrating AI into consumer services. Alibaba’s Qwen chatbot recently experimented with letting users purchase items directly through conversational prompts.
This shift reflects business realities. Companies like Alibaba are under pressure from shareholders to monetize investments in artificial intelligence through consumer and enterprise applications while continuing to fund expensive infrastructure expansion.
Experts say the market also wants to see what Chinese companies can achieve beyond initial successes such as DeepSeek.
“It would be surprising if some of these new models don’t end up being impressive,” Alfredo Montufar-Helu, managing director of consultancy Ankura in Beijing, told Reuters. “I think people have high expectations.”
Focus on self-sufficiency and innovation
It’s also worth noting that AI models are not China’s only focus. In addition to adopting DeepSeek’s open source approach, competitors have also stepped up their recruitment of top artificial intelligence researchers. China already has more than half of the world’s artificial intelligence researchers and is a global leader in publishing artificial intelligence research.
Meanwhile, earlier this week, Reuters report China’s ByteDance is also looking to develop its own AI semiconductors in partnership with South Korean chipmaking giant Samsung.
The report quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that ByteDance plans to receive chip samples before the end of March this year. The company plans to produce at least 100,000 of the chips this year, which are designed for artificial intelligence reasoning tasks. ByteDance hopes to gradually increase production to 350,000 units.
Although a company spokesperson said the report was inaccurate, if successful, it would mark a milestone for ByteDance. As early as 2022, the company has been looking to develop chips to support its artificial intelligence workloads.
At the same time, ByteDance’s rivals Alibaba and Baidu have also taken the lead in the development of artificial intelligence chips. Alibaba last month launched Zhenwu chips for large-scale artificial intelligence workloads. Baidu sells chips to external customers and plans to take its chip unit Kunlun Core public soon.
These efforts are integrated with Beijing’s larger goal of creating self-sufficient supply chains for key technologies such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence, especially as Beijing faces strict U.S. export controls that limit its access to technologies such as advanced semiconductors.
This week, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang reiterated this goal.
Although Li recommended To make better use of resources such as computing power and artificial intelligence talents, Xi Jinping called for concentrated efforts to promote scientific and technological “breakthroughs”. According to the official Xinhua News Agency.
He said that “self-reliance and self-reliance through science and technology” will be “the key to building our country into a powerful modern socialist country.”
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