Sora finds a new rival in China as start-up Shengshu AI rolls out text-to-video tool
- Shengshu exemplifies how China’s prestigious Tsinghua University has emerged as a main force backing the country’s AI ambitions
The video generation model is accessible through its official website, making it the latest Chinese start-up to offer text-to-video services to the public following players like Zhipu AI and Kuaishou Technology. Users registered with the service will be able to generate clips of four or eight seconds in length.
Shengshu said Vidu is able to generate a four-second clip in 30 seconds, according to a statement. That makes it one of the fastest on the market, as other similar tools usually take longer to generate a video of similar length.
Shengshu exemplifies how China’s prestigious Tsinghua University has emerged as a main force backing the country’s AI ambitions. Behind Vidu is the firm’s self-developed architecture called U-ViT, first detailed in a September 2022 research paper authored by a team led by Zhu Jun, Shengshu AI’s chief scientist, who is also a computer science professor at Tsinghua University.