ByteDance’s AI Video Model Quietly Beat Google’s Veo 3 at Its Own Game
Google Veo 3 is an impressive video generation model recently unveiled by Google, sparking widespread excitement on the internet. Its capabilities have left many stunned, with some even calling it scary good. The model features audio synthesis and cinematic tools, setting a new benchmark in AI-powered video generation. While the tech world celebrated Google’s Veo 3 launch, ByteDance quietly released something that might be even better. TikTok’s parent company recently published the research paper for Seedance 1.0, a bilingual video generation model that now tops independent leaderboards for both text-to-video and image-to-video generation. ByteDance did not launch with an event or demo. Instead, its technical benchmarks got the company into the spotlight without any serious marketing efforts. The model is built to support high-resolution, multi-shot generation while maintaining fast inference and tight instruction adherence. How Seedance 1.0 Crushed Veo 3 The company introduced the technology in the research paper, stating, “We decouple spatial and temporal layers with an interleaved multimodal positional encoding. This allows our model to jointly learn both text-to-video and image-to-video in a single model, and natively support multi-shot video generation.” This approach enables the AI model to support complex scene transitions and multi-shot storytelling with consistent subject representation. A significant part of the model’s performance stems from ByteDance’s data pipeline. The team curated a large-scale, multi-source dataset with detailed bilingual captions and dense annotation of motion and static features. Caption accuracy was prioritised to improve prompt adherence during generation. This was paired with a novel reinforcement learning setup using three reward models focused on foundational alignment, motion quality, and aesthetics. In evaluation, Seedance 1.0 outperformed Veo 3 across multiple dimensions. On the SeedVideoBench benchmark, designed in collaboration with film directors, the model demonstrated higher scores in prompt-following and motion realism. Notably, in image-to-video tasks, Seedance retained more visual consistency from the input frame, while Veo 3 showed occasional changes in lighting and texture, the research paper claimed. Inference performance is another notable aspect. In terms of speed, Seedance 1.0 leaves the rest behind. The company claims that it generates a five-second video at 1080p in just 41.4 seconds on a single NVIDIA-L20, an inference time that’s an order of magnitude faster than rivals like Sora, Runway Gen-4 and, of course, Veo 3. ByteDance also mentioned that it slashed costs and latency in a way that could push video generation towards real-time use cases. Moreover, the AI model managed to top the leaderboard chart on Artificial Analysis, for both text-to-video and image-to-video generation tasks. Reevaluating Veo 3 for Comparison Veo 3 remains a technically ambitious system. It introduced audio-aware video synthesis and provided users with control over camera movement and shot composition via its Flow tool. Early user reactions highlighted the novelty of its synchronised dialogue and dynamic environments, placing it at the forefront of audio-visual generation. However, in direct comparisons, Veo 3 seems to fall short in visual alignment and frame consistency. The Seedance 1.0 research paper noted that Veo’s image-to-video results sometimes altered subject appearance or scene lighting, impacting its overall effectiveness. While Veo succeeded in expanding the modality of generative video, its performance in traditional benchmarks lagged behind. In contrast, Seedance 1.0 focuses on visual coherence and motion plausibility, with structured reinforcement learning and curated fine-tuning data playing key roles. Its strengths lie in reliability and controllability, especially for multi-shot or long-duration sequences, scenarios critical for professional or semi-automated content creation. Scheduled for a June 2025 integration across platforms like Doubao and Jimeng, Seedance 1.0 is poised to become a key productivity tool. Its aim is to improve professional workflows and regular creative tasks significantly. While Veo 3 gained attention for being the first to combine realistic video with ambient sound and dialogue, Seedance 1.0 achieved better visual fidelity, motion stability, and narrative coherence, but lacks audio capabilities.
The AI-powered video generation landscape might have just been reset by TikTok’s parent company.
The AI-powered video generation landscape might have just been reset by TikTok’s parent company.
["ByteDance", "Google"]
["ByteDance", "Go", "ELT", "programming_languages:R", "AI", "ETL", "Modal", "data pipeline", "Aim", "ViT", "Google", "R"]
["AI", "Aim", "R", "Go", "data pipeline", "ETL", "ELT", "ViT", "Modal", "programming_languages:R"]
I am a tech aficionado and a computer science graduate with a keen interest in AI, Coding, Open Source, and Cloud. Have a tip? Reach out to ankush.das@aimmediahouse.com