Move over Sora 2, there’s a warm recent AI video model in town.
In early February, ByteDance unveiled Seedance 2.0, a major update to its flagship video model that had previously remained somewhat unrecognized. Its powerful capabilities immediately shocked China’s AI ecosystem, even among audiences who were once skeptical of AI-generated videos and viewed the technology mainly as a way to produce duds.
Feng Ji, founder of Game Science, the studio that created the Chinese video game that became a global hit Black Myth: Wukongwrote online that he was “deeply shocked” by the model’s capabilities and believed that Seedance 2.0 would pose a stern challenge to China’s current copyright laws and content moderation systems. Mr. Tianhong, who runs a Chinese professional video production studio that has more than 15 million followers on social media, posted a video saying that Seedance 2.0 is significantly better than any previous video creation models. “It looks like a director,” Pan said.
However, most people cannot currently get their hands on this model as access to it is quite constrained. Starting this week, ByteDance is allowing existing users of its consumer-facing AI apps in China – the most popular of which is the chatbot app Doubao, but the company also has a confusing constellation of lesser-known apps like Jimeng, Xiaoyunque and Spark – to employ Seedance 2.0. All of these apps are intended exclusively for the Chinese domestic market and prevent people from outside the country from testing the model themselves. (The restrictions have led some experienced people in China to resell their ByteDance accounts to enthusiastic AI beginners abroad).
However, there are many indications that this model may soon become more available. This week, ByteDance updated its API platform and revealed the proposed pricing for Seedance 2.0: It will cost just over $2 to produce a 15-second video, the longest it can currently generate, a Chinese publication Estimated IT house. ByteDance still hasn’t made API access available to third-party developers, but that should be on the horizon.
Afra Wang, writer of the Substack newsletter Parallel and a close observer of the US-China AI landscape, told me that Seedance 2.0 is another engaging example of how the two countries have taken divergent paths. Even before the release of Seedance 2.0, some of the world’s most recognized AI video creation tools, such as Kling AI, were developed by Chinese companies. “China hasn’t produced any decent AI coding tool, so all Chinese are dependent on Claude Code or Codex, but when it comes to video AI, China is miles ahead of the US,” says Wang.
But all the hype aside, Seedance faces two major problems. A few weeks after its launch, ByteDance is struggling with a computing bottleneck that causes it to take hours to generate a single video. Meanwhile, major studios including Disney, Netflix and Paramount have sent cease-and-desist letters to ByteDance, claiming that Seedance 2.0 products infringe their copyrighted works. ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bandwidth problem
Even if you have access to the ByteDance AI application, generating a video using Seedance 2.0 is still not straightforward because too many people are trying to do the same thing and ByteDance has not yet provided everyone with enough computing resources.
When I tried to create a clip using one of ByteDance’s apps this week, I was told my queue number was 90,985 and it would take about four hours to generate a five-second video. After waiting two hours, the app told me I had six more hours to employ. At this point I decided to just go to sleep.