Written by Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING, Feb 12 (Reuters) – ByteDance’s new video-generating artificial intelligence model has already impressed the likes of Elon Musk and is going viral in China, where it has been compared to DeepSeek and praised for its ability to generate cinematic storylines with just a few prompts.
While text-centric AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DeepSeek’s R1 have become widely adopted, models focused on video and image generation represent the next frontier in the technology’s disruptive potential.
ByteDance, which officially announced Seedance 2.0 on Thursday, said in a statement that the system was designed for professional film, e-commerce and advertising production as it can process text, images, audio and video simultaneously, reducing content creation costs.
The product launch comes as investors in China and around the world are eyeing the successor to Chinese startup DeepSeek’s R1 and V3 models, which caused a collective shock when they debuted globally in early 2025.
On Chinese social media, Seedance 2.0 was compared to DeepSeek’s meteoric rise to fame.
“Early last year, the release of DeepSeek-R1 sparked a heated debate in the US technology community over a ‘Sputnik moment,'” Chinese state newspaper Global Times wrote in an editorial on Wednesday.
“This year has furthered the continued huge success of Seedance 2.0 and similar innovations, creating a wave of admiration for China within Silicon Valley.”
The buzz generated by Seedance 2.0 was highlighted when the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, responded to a post praising models on his social media platformX with the comment: “It’s happening fast.”
Users on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo shared videos generated by the AI model, showcasing the complexity and image quality of its output, no matter how bizarre the prompt.
One two-minute video, which has been viewed nearly 1 million times on Weibo, depicts rapper and record producer Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and reality TV star Kim Kardashian speaking and singing in Mandarin as characters in a court drama set in imperial China.
Hashtags related to Seedance 2.0 on Weibo have received tens of millions of clicks, including an article in the state-run newspaper Beijing Daily titled “From DeepSeek to Seedance, China’s AI is a success.”
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Kate Mayberry)
