ByteDance’s new model sparks stock rally as China’s AI video battle escalates

TikTok parent ByteDance’s pre-release of its latest artificial intelligence video model, Seedance 2.0, over the weekend has sent ripples across the tech and video production sectors as competition among Chinese tech titans’ AI apps intensifies.The model – still in beta and available to select users of Jimeng AI, ByteDance’s AI video platform – delivered enhanced lifelike video outputs that blurred the boundary between AI content and reality, offered smoother camera movement and improved visual consistency, according to early adopters.The buzz has sent stock prices rallying across some Chinese media and AI app firms, with analysts hopeful that AI could be further harnessed to benefit traditional filmmaking and content creation. Shares in studio company Huace Media and game developer Perfect World rose around 7 per cent and 10 per cent on Monday, while publishing house COL Group hit its 20 per cent daily price ceiling.Seedance 2.0 also featured multimodal input, supporting text, image, audio and video-based content generation, making it a handy yet powerful tool for creating video clips that would traditionally have required professional video production and editing skills.It has drawn widespread attention and early praise, with testers saying they were amazed at its ability to generate lifelike characters as well as provide improved and precise control over editing parts of the video content.“With its reality enhancements, I feel it’s very hard to tell whether a video is generated by AI,” said Wang Lei, a programmer from China’s southern Guangdong province.Wang described using simple text prompts to produce a 10-second clip charting human history from prehistoric times to the modern era, praising the result as “smooth in storytelling with cinematic grandeur”. He credited the vast video data resources available through Douyin – China’s largest short-video app and TikTok’s Chinese counterpart – with helping ByteDance train the model.