In business, profit is the ultimate goal—but the path to achieving it differs from company to company.
Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs) have taken center stage in the tech world. Companies of all sizes have scrambled to compete or integrate AI into their platforms, intensifying the race for dominance in the West.
But China was watching—and it didn’t take long before it entered the race.
Even before the tension in the U.S. subsides after the realization of DeepSeek-R1 that can match Western AI tools but with fraction the cost and the resources, ByteDance entered the commotion by pouring more fuel into the fire.
TikTok's parent company unveils not one, but two AI-powered video generators, which should make the U.S. even more worried.
Read: DeepSeek, The Chinese AI That Makes Silicon Valley Nervous And The U.S. Concerned
The Chinese company has unveiled 'OmniHuman-1,' a new multimodal video generation framework capable of transforming a single image into highly sophisticated videos with synchronized audio.
On the project's GitHub page, several stunning examples showcase its capabilities—each video generated from just one image and an audio file.
The lip-syncing is nearly flawless, the image resolution is impressively high, and visible glitches are minimal.
Beyond photorealistic videos, the platform can also generate cartoons, animated artificial objects, animals, and even complex, dynamic poses with remarkable accuracy.
Before announcing OmniHuman-1, the company announced 'Goku,' which offers similar text to video quality.
However, the Goku model only features 8B parameters, which is incredibly small for this kind of quality.
The idea of building the model is target a more specific market, or specifically, the advertising market.
In this case, ByteDance taps on its massive catalog of TikTok videos and shopping experiences.
its GItHub page shows a range of clips which are quite clearly aimed at short or long form social media applications. Women and men using body products and other cheesy demo clips predominate.
While Goku is shown to target a more niche market, it can be destined to encompass a larger target.
If done right, Goku can be a useful tool for animations and all its forms.
OmniHuman-1 and Goku effectively show how fast China is catching up to the U.S..
ByteDance, sitting alongside other Chinese tech titans like Alibaba and Tencent, and not to mention the newcomer DeepSeek, are changing how the West should consider a competition.
The more the merrier, rivalries in this emerging but extremely lucrative market is something no one could have imagined even a year ago.
It's worth noting that Kling AI from Kuaishou, another Chinese tech company, has proven itself that it can do what the West does.
But Kling AI's influence is insignificant, despite showing a lot of promise, most of which is because of its size.
But ByteDance is playing in a whole different league.
OmniHuman-1 and Goku can shake the entire industry because they come from a company which owns the largest video media library in the world, after Google and Meta.