ByteDance’s AI Ambitions Are Being Hampered by Compute Restraints and Copyright Concerns

ByteDance’s new Seedance 2.0 AI video model seemed unstoppable—until heavy demand strained the company’s compute capacity and copyright complaints began piling up.

Move over Sora 2, there’s a hot new AI video model in town.

In early February, ByteDance unveiled Seedance 2.0, a major upgrade to its flagship video model, which had previously remained fairly obscure. Its powerful capabilities immediately shocked the AI ecosystem in China, even among audiences who had once been skeptical of AI-generated video and viewed the technology mainly as a way to produce slop.

Feng Ji, the founder of Game Science, the studio that developed China’s global hit video game Black Myth: Wukong, wrote online that he was “deeply shocked” by the model’s abilities and believed Seedance 2.0 would pose significant challenges to China’s current copyright regulations and content moderation systems. Pan Tianhong, who leads a ...