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

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 Chinese professional video production studio with over 15 million followers on social media, posted a video in which he said Seedance 2.0 is significantly better than any video-making models that came before it. “It thinks like a director,” Pan said.

However, most people can’t get their hands on the model at this moment because access remains fairly restricted. As of this week, ByteDance is only allowing existing users of its consumer-facing AI apps in China—the most popular one is the chatbot app Doubao, but the company also has a confusing constellation of lesser-known apps like Jimeng, Xiaoyunque, and Spark—to experience Seedance 2.0. All these apps are for the Chinese domestic market only, preventing people outside the country from testing the model themselves. (The restrictions have prompted some savvy people in China to resell their ByteDance accounts to eager early AI adopters overseas.)

But there are signs that the model might become more accessible soon. This week, ByteDance updated its API platform and disclosed the proposed pricing of Seedance 2.0: A 15-second video, the longest it can generate right now, would cost slightly more than $2 to make, Chinese publication IT Home estimated. ByteDance still hasn’t opened up API access to third-party developers, but that should be on the horizon.

Afra Wang, author of the Substack newsletter Concurrent and a close observer of the US-China AI landscape, tells me that Seedance 2.0 is another interesting example of how the two countries have taken diverging paths. Even before the release of Seedance 2.0, some of the most established video-making AI tools in the world, such as Kling AI, were developed by Chinese companies. “​​China hasn’t produced any decent AI coding tool, which is why Chinese people are all dependent on Claude Code or Codex; but when it comes to video AI, China is miles ahead of the US,” Wang says.

But all the hype aside, Seedance is running into two serious problems. Weeks into its release, ByteDance is facing a compute bottleneck that is causing the model to take hours to generate a single video. Meanwhile, major movie studios, including Disney, Netflix, and Paramount, have all sent ByteDance cease-and-desist letters alleging that Seedance 2.0’s outputs are infringing on their copyrighted works. ByteDance did not immediately return a request for comment.

The Bandwidth Problem

Even if you get access to a ByteDance AI app, it’s still far from easy to generate a video with Seedance 2.0, because too many people are trying to do the same thing, and ByteDance has yet to provide enough compute resources for everyone.

When I tried to create a clip with one of ByteDance’s apps this week, it told me that I was number 90,985 in the queue, and it would take about four hours to generate a five-second video. After waiting for two hours, the app told me I now had six more to go. At that point, I decided to just go to bed.