A boat caught in a storm in a painter’s studio, a panda playing a guitar or even an aquarium covering a woman’s head and in which a goldfish evolves… It is with these improbable scenes that Chinese society This Saturday, Shengshu presented its artificial intelligence tool capable of creating hyper-realistic videos.
Called “Vidu”, it allows, according to the company, to create, from text, videos lasting 16 seconds in high definition. “Vidu”, which targets the Chinese market, will initially only be available in beta.
This is a new product called Vidu by a company called Shengshu! It is crazy as hell and I think this might be the one closest to sora! 16s + 1080p, truly amazing! pic.twitter.com/eoWoKknT7O
— Junyang Lin (@JustinLin610) April 27, 2024
China’s objective is clear: to compete head-on with “Sora”, the American artificial intelligence tool also capable of creating realistic videos by simply entering a text. Owned by OpenAI, the publisher of ChatGPT and the DALL-E image generator, Sora caused a sensation when it was presented in the United States last February.
Chinese digital giants at work
The prowess of this new tool, currently still in the experimental phase, is followed with passion in China, because it constitutes a major innovation in the field of artificial intelligence. “Since the release of Sora, Vidu is the first video model of this performance in the world,” said Shengshu.
To catch up with OpenAi, the company, created only last year in Beijing, brought out the heavy artillery. According to its website, Shengshu counts on its team engineers from Chinese digital giants ByteDance (owner of TikTok), Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, as well as from the prestigious Tsinghua University.
US launches advisory committee on ‘safe and secure’ use of AI
The bosses of OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are among the most high-profile members of a new federal council created to advise the US government on the “safe and secure” use of artificial intelligence (AI).
The new committee will help authorities combat AI-related disruptions that may “impact national or economic security, public health, or safety,” the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a statement released Friday.
President Joe Biden tasked the department’s secretary general, Alejandro Mayorkas, with setting up this 22-member advisory body.