China's second-largest short video app Kuaishou unveils SORA-like product as it tries to catch up with AI
Chinese short-video app Kuaishou, a major rival to TikTok sister app Douyin, has launched a text-to-video conversion service similar to OpenAI's Sora, the latest sign that China's tech giants are trying hard to catch up with their U.S. peers in artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
Currently in testing, the Kling AI model can process text to create video clips of up to two minutes in 1080p resolution with support for different aspect ratios, and can also interpret instructions to generate videos that mimic the real world, or create imaginative scenes from text instructions, according to app company Kuaishou Technology.
A series of demonstration videos posted by Kuaishou show a white cat driving a car through a busy city center, with skyscrapers and pedestrians in the background, a bespectacled Chinese boy eating a cheeseburger at a fast-food restaurant, and a child riding a bike in a garden and experiencing the changing seasons.
Kuaishou is one of several Chinese tech companies racing to launch rival products to Sora. In April, local startup Shengshu Technology launched a similar tool called Vidu in collaboration with Tsinghua University. Zhipu AI, one of China's leading generative AI startups, is reportedly planning to launch a comparable product later this year.
The text-to-video feature is Kuaishou's latest AI innovation, following the launch of the KwaiYii large-scale language model (LLM) and text-to-image model Kolors in May. The “AI Dancer” feature, available on the Kuaishou app and video-making app Kwaiying, allows users to upload still images and generates videos of characters dancing to specific rhythms and movements. The company also announced that it will soon launch an image-to-video feature based on the features of the Kling model.
Amid a boom in AI startups in China's tech industry, Chinese media outlet Lingtai reported in May that Fu Ruiji, technical lead for Kuaishou's Knowledge Graph and LLM projects, had left the company to “prepare for an AI startup project.”
Meanwhile, Chinese social media and video game giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. claims its Hunyuan LLM is now the best in the world. Tencent is enhancing its AI model that creates images and videos based on text prompts, according to its president, Martin Lau Chi-ping, who called the effort “the most important one for us this year” on a media call in March.
On May 22, Kuaishou reported strong quarterly results, reporting a net profit of RMB 4.12 billion (US$575.1 million), compared to a net loss of RMB 876 million in the same period last year. Revenue increased 17% year-on-year to RMB 29.41 billion, mainly driven by online marketing services and e-commerce businesses. Total e-commerce revenue increased 28% during the quarter to RMB 288.07 billion.
Kuaishou has reached about 400 million daily active users, making it the second-largest short video app in China after Bytedance's Douyin, which has more than 600 million daily active users.
