Did China Just Smoke Hollywood?

there’s a new video generation champion in town, and it ain't american. here's why seedance is so weirdly good, and what it means for the future of the ai arms race.

Ryan Hassan and Evan Milenko

Mar 12, 2026

If you’ve been on X at all recently, you’re aware that it is so, so, over for Hollywood — at least that’s what all the poasters are saying.

Over the past few weeks, Seedance 2.0, Chinese tech giant ByteDance’s newest AI video model, has unleashed an avalanche of viral videos better than any we’ve seen from an American company, like this:

For a while there, it seemed like American AI companies were years ahead in AI… how the hell is China crushing us here?

While we don’t yet know exactly how ByteDance built this model, it’s clear that the differentiating factor is data. AI lives and dies on data, and ByteDance — the parent company of TikTok, CapCut (their editing software), and Douyin (China’s version of TikTok) — owns one of the largest repositories of high-quality video data on Earth. In hindsight, their dominance here was probably inevitable.