AI: US/China AI 'Space Race'is on. RTZ #341

...OpenAI's Sora vs China's Vidu the latest steps in AI moon shots

The US/China ongoing geopolitical tech and AI ‘threading the needle’ tussle in this AI Tech Wave, continues to accelerate in a tit for tat set of steps in extraordinary directions. A few weeks ago, OpenAI made big AI waves releasing its next gen Sora AI text to video LLM technologies. I wrote about it as being definitively innovative vs other venture backed efforts like Runway, Pika Labs and others.

This time we saw an impressive release of a similar effort from China called ‘Vidu’. Released by leading Chinese AI researchers from their top universities.

As China Daily outlines in “China's first Sora-level text-to-video large model Vidu unveiled”:

“China's first Sora-level text-to-video large model Vidu was unveiled at the 2024 Zhongguancun Forum in Beijing on Saturday, intensifying the artificial intelligence competition globally.”

“Vidu, developed by Chinese AI firm Shengshu Technology and Tsinghua University, told China Daily that the model can create a high-definition video 16 seconds long and 1080p resolution in just one click.” 

“The company said that it is China's first inaugural video large model with extended duration, exceptional consistency, and dynamic capabilities and is "very close to" the level of Sora.”

“Sora is a generative AI model developed by the United States' OpenAI earlier this year. With its ability to build realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions, the model has taken the tech world by storm.”

“Compared with Sora, Vidu is able to understand and generate Chinese elements such as the panda and dragon.”

“The company also added that the core architecture of the large model was initiated in September 2022, which was earlier than Sora's adoption of its architecture.”

Echoes of history rhyming here with the intense tit for tat competition post the Sputnik launch in 1957 that kicked off the race to the Moon, culminating in the first US landing in 1969.

This is a similarly spectacular set of investments, driven by governments, and public/private commitments in the hundreds of billions. And it may even bleed into actual an AI race in space too.

The internet as one can imagine has already gone into intense comparison mode of the two sets of technologies, with this video being a representative sample.

And just like Sputnik started with a metal ball lobbed into space, and the race ended with two humans jumping around on the moon 12 years later, this race too has likely a decade or more to play out at least.

Just thought we should step back and watch this small moment for AI, and anticipate some giant things for human kind. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)