Competition is heating up in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) video-generation technology in China, after internet giant Tencent Holdings launched its new open-source HunyuanVideo-I2V model to developers.
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The image-to-video model, based on Tencent’s open-source HunyuanVideo foundation model introduced in December, lets users turn a static photo into a 720-pixel, high-resolution video clip of up to 129 frames, or five seconds, via short text prompts.
Shenzhen-based Tencent, which runs the world’s largest video-gaming business by revenue and China’s biggest social-media network, made the new model widely available on Thursday through online developer platforms like GitHub and HuggingFace.
Users can also add lip-synched voice to their videos as well as background sound effects, according to Tencent. In a demonstration video released by the company, Albert Einstein was shown eating an apple with a crunching sound effect.
China is seeing its field of home-grown AI video-generation products get crowded, more than a year after ChatGPT creator OpenAI astonished developers around the world with its Sora text-to-video model.
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That field includes highly competitive products from Kuaishou Technology, TikTok owner ByteDance and Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing services unit. Alibaba owns the Post.
When HunyuanVideo was made available for free to businesses and individual users in December, Tencent claimed that it was the world’s largest open-source model for video generation, with over 13 billion parameters – a measure of variables present in an AI system during training.