Chinese AI firms fight to stand out from rivals in text-to-video market
- While Chinese firms are behind OpenAi’s Sora in developing text-to-video models, they have shown potential to quickly catch up, analysts say
Chinese firms from start-up Zhipu AI to tech giant ByteDance have rushed to launch artificial intelligence (AI) video-generation tools in recent days, but face challenges in differentiating themselves from local rivals in the market.
Other new market entrants include short video platform operator Kuaishou Technology and start-up Shengshu AI, which released video generation tools for public use. E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding has also published a framework for a Sora-style tool. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
While Chinese firms are a few months behind OpenAi’s Sora in developing models that can turn text into videos, they have shown potential to quickly catch up in the field, analysts said.
Lu Yanxia, research director for emerging technology at IDC China, said text-to-video models have mushroomed thanks to China’s significant investments in AI models. Microsoft-backed OpenAI pioneered text-to-video generation with the debut of Sora in February, but the San Francisco-based start-up has yet to make the product available to the general public, with only a limited number of pilot users given access.
ByteDance was the latest among its peers to introduce its version of Sora, with a video tool called Jimeng released on local Android stores on July 31. It accepts both text and image prompts to generate a clip of up to 12 seconds, making it the top choice when it comes to video length.