While Western countries traditionally believe they hold the reins of digital evolution, there is a predatory silhouette in the rearview mirror. The Chinese tech giant has literally shifted into higher gear, surpassing its American competitors in one of today’s hottest areas: generating videos using artificial intelligence. And while Silicon Valley engineers still have a slight advantage when it comes to platforms for writing code, in the fierce race to create realistic videos from textual descriptions, Asia is already setting the rules with impeccable quality and impressive intuitiveness.
The secret to this lightning-fast sprint lies in the “fuel” of the neural network itself. Training such large-scale models requires vast amounts of raw video material, and China’s vast digital market provides a virtually inexhaustible trove of user content. Moreover, analysts openly hinted to the Financial Times that Eastern programmers often turn a blind eye to copyright issues during the training process. Wow, what a flight of imagination, unencumbered by heavy legal constraints. It is precisely these strict Western regulatory and licensing hurdles that ultimately make U.S. algorithms seem somehow staid, sterile, and far less realistic.
Creative industry professionals are already feeling the difference in their pockets. Ben Chan, founder of innovative studio Director AI, says the wave of new tools from the East is demonstrating an incredible understanding of detail, perfect sound synchronization, and stable motion of virtual actors. George Wong, an independent producer based in Tbilisi, also doesn’t shy away from producing top quality work. The Chinese software allows you to dynamically and complexly change camera angles without blurring faces or distorting the light. Most of the American alternatives in this situation produce annoying digital artifacts and flaws that ruin the whole magic.
In the prestigious ranking of the independent platform Arena, models such as Kling, Seedance 2.0 and HappyHorse 1.0 are leaders. Google’s product Veo 3 is trying to keep up with this pace thanks to unlimited access to YouTube archives, but intellectual property filters prevent it from reaching its full potential. There is a sense that the wind is blowing which way the business is, with Kuaishou already considering spinning off its hit product Kling into a separate company and going public. Of course, the sheer freedom with which ByteDance takes its inspiration from the web has already angered the creators of the Marvel Universe and the cult series South Park, forcing the Chinese to promise tighter controls in the future.
Additionally, working with Asian platforms is easy. Users will not encounter a large number of forbidden words or the software will crash when entering text commands. However, the large influx of Seedance 2.0 earlier this year forced its creators to temporarily limit free access and increase processing times. For U.S. business customers, the price of early access to Seedance can reach a whopping $2 million upfront, but clever tools to circumvent these barriers have quickly come to market. But maintaining such infrastructure drains budgets to the brim. Video requires huge computing resources, far more than those for processing text and audio. That’s why OpenAI surprisingly raised the white flag and halted development of its vaunted Sora model.
Despite the costs, artificial intelligence is already taking over the advertising business on a scale that borders on fantasy. Marketers are thrilled with the high profitability, as the generated clips are nearly indistinguishable from the actual footage shot in the field. Representatives from a major advertising agency admit that they created an astonishing 100,000 alternative videos to meet the needs of a single client, a task that would have required an astronomical amount of money and years of work using traditional Hollywood methods. The current technology race clearly shows that in the digital age, it is not necessarily the person who invents the wheel who wins, but the person who is bolder enough to spin the wheel.
