Tokyo | As fireworks exploded over China this week and millions of families gathered to celebrate the Lunar New Year, China’s top technology firms launched their own kind of spectacle: a blitz of new AI tools designed to go viral over the country’s biggest holiday period.
Since Monday, social media feeds have been filled with stunningly realistic video clips of Brad Pitt trading punches with Tom Cruise in neon-lit alleyways and cute Japanese otaku girls outplaying LeBron James on a basketball court.
The videos, created using a powerful artificial intelligence video generation tool owned by ByteDance, sparked condemnation from some of Hollywood’s top companies.
During China’s most-watched TV show on Monday, start-ups demonstrated their latest humanoid robots that performed sophisticated kung fu on stage, showing how quickly AI models have moved from lab demos to living room entertainment.
The co-ordinated releases – from Alibaba’s latest Qwen large language model to upgrades to freshly listed MiniMax’s companion AI products – also illustrate how China’s tech giants are repositioning AI technology as mass-market consumer products rather than niche enterprise tools.
“A bunch of people have started using these straight away, everyone on WeChat is using their avatars to generate their own videos,” said Race Li, founder of Hangzhou-based music AI start-up Magipop.
“I have friends in the movie industry who are very upset about it, which they should be. But AI is embraced in China, even by mainstream directors and creative people.”
Deliberate timing
The timing is deliberate. Lunar New Year, when millions of Chinese stop work and travel back to their family homes, is traditionally a peak season for shopping, gaming, and online traffic, offering companies a rare window to capture attention at scale.
But it also reflects a broader policy push from Beijing, which is betting that an “AI-plus” strategy can play a role in reviving China’s stuttering economy, including by encouraging consumers who are reluctant to spend when the property sector is struggling and wages are low.
President Xi Jinping has described artificial intelligence as a top economic priority for this year, urging companies to embed the technology across industries to drive new growth.
“The progress of Chinese AI over the past 12 to 18 months has been nothing short of astounding,” said Jiong Shao, lead China tech analyst for Barclays. “Open-source collaboration among the leading labs has allowed China to close the gap with Western models despite significant deficiencies in AI compute.”
Just days before the holiday, TikTok owner ByteDance released Seedance 2.0 and sparked viral attention for how far China’s video-generation technology has advanced in just one year. The multimodal model can take text, images and audio as inputs and generate multi-shot, higher-resolution clips with synchronised sound in under a minute.
Early clips circulating on Weibo and Little Red Book show convincingly choreographed fight sequences and cinematic lighting that would previously have required professional crews and post-production teams, raising fears about copyright and job losses.
Disney brands video tool a ‘virtual smash and grab.’
Hollywood powerhouse Motion Picture Association, a trade organisation representing major American studios such as Netflix, Universal, and Disney, sent the Chinese tech giant a cease and desist notice on Friday.
“In a single day, the Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0 has engaged in unauthorised use of US copyrighted works on a massive scale,” Charles Rivkin, chairman and chief executive of MPA, said in a statement.
Disney’s lawyers accused ByteDance of committing a “virtual smash-and-grab” of their intellectual property, including superheroes from Marvel, Star Wars, and characters from various cartoons.
Rhett Reese, a scriptwriter known for his Deadpool films, said the Cruise-Pitt video had sent a “cold shiver” up his spine.
“For all of us who work in the industry and devoted our careers and lives to it, I just think it’s nothing short of terrifying,” he told The New York Times. “I could just see it costing jobs all over the place.”
ByteDance quickly pledged to curb its new tool, but the burst of launches reflects the intensifying technology rivalry between China and the US. Chinese models are pitched as direct challengers to US leaders such as OpenAI, Google and Nvidia, and the outcry is being cited in Chinese media as validation that the gap is narrowing.
“This is not primarily competing with Hollywood,” Grace Shao, tech analyst at AI Proem, said. “It is enabling a new vertical, AI-native content, where the unit is not a two-hour film, but minutes produced per day, tested across variants, localised quickly, and distributed through feeds.”
The flurry of releases has also sparked a sharp rally in Chinese tech stocks. Hong Kong-listed Zhipu AI surged almost 30 per cent last Thursday after unveiling its latest open-source model, while MiniMax jumped more than 13 per cent following its own upgrade.
Shares in AI-linked infrastructure providers such as UCloud hit daily limits in Shanghai, and SenseTime gained in Hong Kong, as investors piled into so-called “pure-play” AI names. Chinese shares do not trade during the Lunar New Year Holidays.
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