This week, China’s artificial intelligence industry boomed.
On Thursday, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance released a new video-generating artificial intelligence model that quickly became a big hit in China.
On the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo, hashtags related to this model “Seedance 2.0” attracted tens of millions of clicks.
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Reuters reported Users shared videos generated by the AI model, showcasing the complexity and image quality of its output, no matter how bizarre the prompt. This model was also praised for its ability to generate cinematic storylines with only a few prompts.
A two-minute clip purportedly made by the model showed rappers Ye (ex-Kanye West) and Kim Kardashian singing in Mandarin at an imperial Chinese court drama. The number of views has reached 1 million.
Meanwhile…Kanye is back on top in China🤭
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Talk of Seedance 2.0 peaked around billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk. I replied to the post “It’s happening fast,” he commented on his social media platform X, praising the model.
The enthusiasm for this model has some pointing to similarities with DeepSeek, the Chinese open source ChatGPT rival that shook the world’s AI makers a year ago.
For example, the state-run newspaper Beijing Daily said, “From Deep Seek to SeaDance, China’s AI has been successful.”
Another state-run newspaper, the Global Times, wrote in an editorial that “the continued huge success of SeaDance 2.0 and similar innovations is even more advanced than last year’s success of Deep Seek” and “sparked a wave of admiration for China within Silicon Valley.”
More launches are planned in the future.
Chinese media efforts to portray SeaDance as a new “breakthrough” are consistent with the Chinese government’s lofty ambitions to position itself as a world leader in artificial intelligence.
While text-centric AI models like 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.
And ByteDance isn’t the only company vying for the AI market.
Wednesday, Zhipu AI Released the latest AI modelsays it has enhanced coding capabilities and the ability to perform long-running tasks without prompting the user.
A number of other Chinese companies are also preparing to launch new models, some designed to be more appealing to consumers, and aim to surpass DeepSeek’s success.
According to Reuterssome of these companies launch new products around Lunar New Year (China’s longest and busiest holiday period, which officially begins on February 15th).
One of them is internet giant Alibaba, which is expected to unveil its Qwen 3.5 series during the holidays. The model features improved mathematical reasoning and coding capabilities, technology industry news site The Information reported last month.
The company also plans to spend huge amounts of money on $431 million While on vacation to promote the Qwen AI app.
DeepSeek is also preparing to release its next generation model V4 with powerful coding capabilities in mid-February.
China’s open source advantage
Over the past two years, DeepSeek’s models have repeatedly undercut competitors’ prices, making their cost-of-use significantly lower than many U.S. products.
in fact, report A report released last month by RAND, a research group on the U.S.-China AI race, found that Chinese models run about one-sixth to one-fourth the cost of comparable U.S. systems.
“Deep Seek has shown the industry that you can create very good models even with limited resources,” Lian Jie Hsu, principal analyst at tech research firm Omdia, told Reuters.
“The combination of open source access, powerful inference capabilities, and low implementation costs is the model determining how Chinese vendors now approach foundational models.”
Before DeepSeek broke out, some Chinese industry leaders, including Baidu CEO Robin Li, were arguing that closed-source systems would become mainstream.
But within days of DeepSeek’s assistant overtaking ChatGPT in Apple’s App Store downloads in the U.S., Baidu and other major companies began rolling out some of their models.
Currently, open source AI repository Hugging Face is dominated by releases from Chinese tech giants like Baidu, ByteDance, and Tencent, as well as startups like Moonshot. 9 of the top 10 models listed on the repository All are Chinese [as of Feb 13, 1300 GMT].
According to a report in the Washington Post Over the past year, Chinese companies’ open source models have also now become more popular and powerful than their American counterparts.
“Chinese companies are aggressively embracing open source, significantly lowering the barrier for global developers and enterprises to access cutting-edge AI technology,” the Global Times praised Seadance 2.0 in an editorial on Wednesday.
“Big expectations”
Many of China’s leading AI companies are also shifting their focus away from the goal of improving core model performance and towards integrating AI into consumer services. Alibaba’s Qwen chatbot recently experimented with allowing users to directly purchase products through conversational prompts.
The pivot reflects commercial reality. Companies such as Alibaba face pressure from shareholders to monetize AI investments through consumer and enterprise applications while continuing to fund expensive infrastructure expansions.
And experts say the market wants to see what Chinese companies produce beyond early successes like Deep Seek.
“It would be surprising if some of these new models were to disappoint. I think there are high expectations here,” Alfredo Montufer Hell, managing director of Ancra Consulting in Beijing, told Reuters.
Focus on self-sufficiency and innovation
It is also worth noting that AI models are not China’s only focus. In addition to adopting DeepSeek’s open source approach, competitors are also ramping up their hiring of top AI researchers. China already hosts more than half of the world’s AI researchers and is a world leader in publishing AI research.
Meanwhile, earlier this week, Reuters reported that reported China’s ByteDance was reportedly considering developing its own AI semiconductor in collaboration with South Korean semiconductor giant Samsung.
ByteDance aims to receive sample chips by the end of March, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. The company plans to produce at least 100,000 chips designed for AI inference tasks this year. ByteDance is also considering increasing production to a maximum of 350,000 units in stages.
A company spokesperson said the report was inaccurate, but if successful it would be a milestone for ByteDance. The company has been aiming to develop chips that support AI workloads since 2022.
Meanwhile, ByteDance’s rivals Alibaba and Baidu are developing AI chips. Alibaba last month announced its Zhenwu chip for large-scale AI workloads. Baidu sells chips to external customers and plans to list its chip unit Kunlunxin soon.
These efforts tie in with Beijing’s larger goal of building a self-sufficient supply chain for key technologies such as semiconductors and AI, 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 both reiterated this goal.
While Mr. Lee recommended, Xi called for a focused push to “secure breakthroughs” in science and technology by making better use of resources such as computing power and AI talent. According to state media Xinhua News Agency.
He said that “independence and strength in science and technology” is “the key to China’s development into a great modern socialist country.”
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