has surpassed Sora and Veo without NVIDIA chips

• Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting on the rubble of a devastated city.
• The recreation of the most expensive shot in the movie F1 for nine cents.
• Dragon Ball scenes indistinguishable from the original anime.

None of this has been filmed by anyone. Everything has generated Seedance 2.0the ByteDance video model launched a few days ago.

It has its seams, because it builds on already-made creativity and much is missing on a narrative level. But the technical plan is impressive.

Why is it important. It is no longer “China is coming, China is coming.” It’s “this is what China already does.” The independent consultancy CTOL places it above Sora 2 and Veo 3.1 for specific improvements: native 2K resolution, synchronized audio as standard, simultaneous input of text, image, video and audio (something that no Western rival offers at the same time) and 30% faster generation.

Between the lines. The uncomfortable thing for Silicon Valley is not just the quality. The most uncomfortable thing is what it has been achieved with. Seedance has been built without H100NVIDIA chips banned for China. And it still surpasses the models that do have them. It’s already happened something similar with DeepSeek in LLMs and now it happens with synthetic video.

The pattern is consolidating: the sanctions are not serving to slow China down, but rather accelerating it, because they force it to innovate faster.

In dispute. Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Sony have sent termination requests to ByteDance for violating copyright. AND SAG-AFTRA has denounced the use of voices and faces of actors without consent. The trigger was seeing that Seedance was capable of cloning someone’s voice from a single photograph. ByteDance has suspended that feature and promised improvements, without specifying which ones.

Yes, but. The studies are more disarmed than they appear:

• Their claims attack the generation of protected content, not training with that content, which could be covered by fair use law.
• The music industry has already gone through a similar scenario and ended up negotiating.
• Hollywood is headed for the same fate: not being able to stop this, but at least getting a cut.
• Disney already does it with OpenAI. But with Bytedance geopolitics comes into play and whether it will be capable of something similar with a Chinese company, not a Californian one.

The big question. ByteDance has an asset that no one can replicate: the largest short video ecosystem in the world. TikTok and Douyin know, on a scale that is unrivaled, what makes a video tick, and that knowledge is built into Seedance.

When I reach CapCutthe most popular editing app in the world, the impact will reach another level. Right now the question is not whether Seedance is better than Sora. We have already seen that it is. The question is whether the world will be willing to use it.

In Xataka | Seedance 2.0 has flooded the networks with AI-generated videos with Disney content. And Disney has picked up the phone

Featured image | BiliBili – Seedance