TikTok owner ByteDance revs up nascent market for Sora-style services with Jimeng AI app

Jimeng is now available on Apple’s mainland App Store and various local Android app stores, following the desktop version’s release in May

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The roll-out of Jimeng on the mainland shows the lengths taken by ByteDance to keep pace with generative artificial intelligence developments. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 6:30pm, 7 Aug 2024

Social media giant ByteDance, owner of popular short-video platforms TikTok and Douyin, is heating up mainland China’s nascent market for Sora-style text-to-video services with its new Jimeng artificial intelligence (AI) app.

Jimeng, which translates as “immediate dream” in English, has recently become available for download on Apple’s mainland App Store, following its July 31 release on various local Android app stores. The desktop version was launched in May.

Similar to Sora that OpenAI previewed in February, Jimeng generates images and videos based on a user’s text prompts. The service allows a user to create 80 images or 26 videos for free and charges a monthly subscription that costs at least 69 yuan (US$9.70) to generate more videos.

The roll-out of Jimeng on the mainland shows the lengths taken by ByteDance to keep pace with generative AI (GenAI) technology developments, following OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, and the preview of still-unreleased Sora in February.

A screenshot of sample videos generated by ByteDance’s Jimeng artificial intelligence service from a mainland app store. Photo: SCMP

Jimeng also marks the first major product from a team led by Kelly Zhang Nan, who stepped down as Douyin’s chief executive in February to focus on video-editing app CapCut and new content-creation platforms.