The ‘Chinese Netflix’ has designed a plan for AI to generate the majority of its content within five years. It sounds risky

iQiyi, China’s largest video streaming service with more than 400 million monthly active users, announced in its annual content presentation in Beijing which expects AI to generate most of its movies and series within five years. Its founder and CEO, Gong Yu, summed it up before a room of producers and directors with a succinct phrase: “It’s a once-in-a-decade opportunity. We have to go with the tide.” Why is it important. iQiyi is not a minor platform betting on a trend. It is the subsidiary of streaming of Baidu, shares with Alibaba and Tencent the online video oligopoly in China, and operates in the streaming largest in the world by number of users. Whether it decides to pivot towards content generated entirely by AI affects how the rest of the platforms that tend to follow in its footsteps will produce, distribute and monetize audiovisual entertainment. The context. iQiyi has been losing audience for years to Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok owned by ByteDance. Short video has cut into the time that Chinese users spend on long video platforms. The result is that its revenue has fallen by 13% in the first quarter of 2026. The company, listed on Nasdaq, has also applied for a second listing in Hong Kong seeking closer capital. The announcement of the pivot towards AI comes from a certain pressure. In detail. The center of the plan is Nadou Proa suite of AI tools that the company presented on April 20 and that, it says, can manage practically the entire film production process: script, storyboardvideo generation and final assembly. The software does not work with its own models, but rather integrates those of several direct competitors: Alibaba, ByteDance and Kuaishou for the domestic market; Seedance 2.0 and Google I Spy 3.1 for the international version. iQiyi has also launched a library of virtual assets and “signed” talent for third-party creators to generate new content using the platform’s characters and universes. The incentive strategy to attract these external creators involves… An extra 20% on advertising and subscription revenue for those who produce content with Nadou Pro. An inaugural catalog of 16 AI-generated films, in science fiction and anime. A public goal: release a commercially successful AI-generated film before the end of summer 2026. Yes, but. The question that remains to be seen is whether anyone will want to pay to see that. Recent history does not invite optimism. AI-generated video has shown some traction on TikTok and Instagram, where the cost of user attention is practically zero and the scroll Erase any disappointment in a tenth of a second. That this tolerance is transferred to a two-hour feature film for which someone pays a monthly subscription is another story. Between the lines. Gong Yu has said that iQiyi will continue investing in professional production, but in the same sentence he has clarified that this type of content will reduce its relative weight on the platform. The direction is quite clear. The risk is that viewers of C-dramas and the anime Koreans who have made iQiyi great are exactly the type of audience that has the least tolerance for ‘AI slop‘. Main loser? The producers and directors who filled that room in Beijing when Gong Yu announced the pivot. iQiyi has designed a system where independent creators can use Nadou Pro to generate content and earn a percentage of the advertising revenue. It’s the same model that YouTube has applied for years with human content, now transferred to AI. In this scheme, professionals in the sector go from being the protagonists of the production chain to being, in the best case, supervisors of a process that they no longer control. In Xataka | In China, 470 series made with AI are produced per day. 99.9% of them do not reach anyone Featured image | iQiyi, Xataka with Mockuuups Studio

The vast majority are Chinese

Mark Zuckerberg has a goal and is moving heaven and earth To get it. Dissatisfied with the Meta advances in AIthe CEO set out to create a team of ‘Superinteligencia’ to lead the next great jump of this technology. Offered More than 100 million dollars to the candidates and even has signed OpenAi talent. The thing marches and Zuckerberg already has eleven AI stars in his new team. The striking: seven of them are Chinese and six of them come from Openai. And this without counting Alexandr Wang, the director of the new team and founder of Scale AI. The team. After several weeks starring headlines for his aggressive offers, Zuckerberg already has his superintelligence team, or at least part of him. These are the names of the eleven experts that will be incorporated into the Palo Alto offices: Bi Suchao (ex-openai. China): He was co-creator of the GPT-4O and O4-mini voice mode. Chang Huiwen (Ex-Openai. China): Co-creator of the GPT-4O image generator. Before he worked in Google, where he created Maskit and Muse. Lin Ji (Ex-Openai. China): He worked on the creation of several language models, from GPT-4O to GPT-4.5. He also dealt with the reasoning of Operator. Ren Hongyu (Ex-Openai. China): He helped create several models and led the post-training team. Sun Pei (Ex-Google. China): He was the principal investigator in Deepmind and had an important role in the creation of Gemini. Zhao Shengjia (Ex-Openai. China): He directed the synthetic data program and was key in the creation of Chatgpt. Yu Jiahui (Ex-Openai. China) He led the perception team. Joel Poblar (ex-anthropic. Australia): He worked on the creation of inference systems. Bansal Trapit (Ex-Openai. India): Co-creator of several language models and pioneer of the combination between reinforced learning and ‘chain of thought’. Jack RAE (Ex-Google. United States): Scientific researcher at Deepmind. Johan Schakwyk (formerly. United States): expert in language technologies. He also worked in Google and Maya Leakage talent. The target signing list reveals something we already talked about, China concentrates a lot of specialized talent in AI. According to Jensen Huang statementsCEO of Nvidia, “50% of the world’s researchers are Chinese” and this would give China a great advantage in the AI ​​race. However, if the best engineers end up working for American Big Tech, in practice that advantage may not be so great. As They count on South China Morning Postthe announcement has generated reactions in China. Mainly of pride, but also of concern for the departure of that talent towards its main competitor. It is not an unfounded fear: it is currently estimated that 38% of experts who work in the United States have formed in China. Nevertheless, China has a plan And it is not only to produce more talent, but to do even better. They are already prioritizing races linked to AI and are beginning to integrate training related to primary and secondary schools. The race for AI. The United States was very advanced in AI, so that it seemed unattainable, but recently we have seen how China cut distances. The quality gap is smaller than ever: in just one year they have managed to cut it from 9.26% to 1.7%. Although in the United States they still have many more models, in China they are opting for a more efficient approach with less models, much cheaper and that they are getting very good results. The other victim. We do not forget Openai. At first there was talk that Goal had signed four key employeesbut with the new published names it would be at least seven. In an internal statement, Openai’s research director Mark Chen said “I have a visceral feeling right now, As if someone had sneaked into our house and stole somethingChen also assured that they were not going to stay with crossed arms and would make counteroffers, something that does not seem to have served much. Footballer salaries. Zuckerberg’s strategy to capture talent has been extremely aggressive, offering bonds of up to 100 million dollars to engineers, causing him to make him IA experts become the best paid in history. And not to mention the 14.3 billion dollars that he has allocated to take Scale AI and his young founded Alexandr Wang, whom he has given the leadership of this new team. Now we just have to wait to see the fruits that come out of this Dream Team. Image | Goal and David Yu in Pixabay In Xataka | The AI ​​industry has become a kind of ‘game of thrones’. And that reveals a worrying truth for your future

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