"The speed of Chinese corporations' artificial intelligence (AI) development is astonishingly fast."
OpenAI Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sam Altman said this at the "AI Impact Summit" held in India this month. Since last year, he has warned that if the United States does not respond actively while "underestimating China's technological capabilities," America's lead in the U.S.-China AI race could weaken. As Chinese big tech corporations have been carpet-bombing the market with next-generation AI models, concerns are rising that CEO Altman's warning is becoming reality.
In fact, ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, China's AI offensive has intensified, narrowing the gap with U.S. AI corporations. From TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. to Alibaba and Baidu, China's major big tech corporations have rolled out high-performance, low-cost AI models one after another. Chinese corporations are standing out not only in text-based large language models (LLMs) but also in image, video, and audio generation models, leading analysts to see the U.S.-China AI war expanding into a competition of Multimodal AI models that process audiovisual data.
According to the related industry on the 23rd, "SeeDance 2.0," a video-generation AI model unveiled by China's ByteDance Ltd. on the 12th of this month, shocked the global film industry, including Hollywood. It is a state-of-the-art model that creates a 15-second, high-quality video by entering only a short prompt or a few photos. A fight scene between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt made by Irish film director Ruairí Robinson using "SeeDance 2.0" went viral, drawing reviews that it was indistinguishable from an actual movie scene.
In the film industry, a sense of crisis has grown that high-performance AI like SeeDance will replace video content production that once required massive capital and long production timelines. In particular, pessimism has spread that AI could take over complex action sequences and post-production work. Rhett Reese, screenwriter of the "Deadpool" series, said after seeing footage generated by "SeeDance 2.0," "It sent chills down my spine," adding, "For people who have devoted their careers and lives to the film industry, this is truly frightening. I can already see jobs disappearing."
Netflix, Disney and Paramount harshly criticized SeeDance as a "high-speed piracy engine" and demanded a halt to generating videos using their movies, drama and other copyrighted works. As the copyright controversy flared, ByteDance Ltd. said it would delay the global release of "SeeDance 2.0" and launch it after strengthening safety features related to copyright and deepfakes.
Even after releasing "SeeDance 2.0," ByteDance Ltd. has mounted a volume offensive, rolling out the image-generation model "SeeDream 5.0 Lite" on the 13th and the LLM "Duobao-Seed 2.0" on the 14th.
It is also speeding up global talent acquisition. ByteDance Ltd., which currently has more than 1,000 research and development personnel, recently posted over 100 AI and semiconductor-related job openings in the United States. Industry observers say ByteDance Ltd. is expanding related investment to build full-stack AI capabilities spanning AI models, AI chips and cloud, thereby reducing external dependence. In particular, it is making an all-out push to design AI chips in-house for AI development.
China's Alibaba also unveiled its next-generation AI model "Qwen 3.5-Plus" on the 16th of this month. The new model features AI agents that autonomously perform complex tasks and significantly improved Multimodal capabilities while cutting deployment costs by up to 60%. Alibaba emphasized its low-cost, high-efficiency strategy, saying, "We have enabled more tasks to be processed with the same computing resources." Zhipu AI, which listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange last month, also released "GLM-5," specialized for coding and agent tasks, in midmonth. Zhipu AI said that while GLM-5 is larger than the previous model, it applies DeepSeek technology to handle long context efficiently while lowering costs.
DeepSeek, which triggered a "DeepSeek shock" in the AI market last year, is also set to release its next-generation model "V4." The industry is closely watching, expecting DeepSeek's successor model to continue the high-performance, low-cost trend.
U.S. AI corporations appear wary of China's AI rise. OpenAI's Altman, the developer of ChatGPT, said Chinese corporations "have surpassed OpenAI in some areas," adding, "The progress of Chinese corporations is astonishing across the entire tech stack." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that allowing the export of Nvidia chips to China "is like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea," saying China must be prevented from leveraging cutting-edge U.S. AI chips. Microsoft President Brad Smith said there is "some cause for concern" about Chinese competitors receiving government subsidies.