While everyone is talking about large models like Google Veo, Sora, or Kling, ByteDance has decided to prove that size isn’t everything. Their new AI model, Seaweed, has “only” 7 billion parameters – yet performs on par with much larger and more expensive systems.
What does that mean in practice?
Seaweed supports multiple modes: text-to-video, image-to-video, and even audio-guided video generation. Output length goes up to 20 seconds, and the quality? Human evaluations rank it very high — especially in tasks like image-to-video translation, where it sometimes outperforms even Sora and Wan 2.1.
And it’s not just “generate and hope for the best” – Seaweed can handle complex actions like storytelling across multiple scenes, controlled camera movements, and even synchronized sound and lip motion. It particularly excels at realistic human animation, making it well-suited for digital avatars, video tutorials, or virtual influencers.
What makes this model even more impressive is its efficiency – it consumes significantly fewer resources than competitors while still delivering near top-tier results.
And while China already leads the AI video race with models like Wan and Kling, Seaweed proves you don’t need a massive model for creativity – just smart design and a focus on what truly matters.
In brief: Tech World Highlights
- Liquid Sciences introduced Hyena Edge, a hybrid AI with a “convolutional” architecture that enables faster processing and improved benchmark performance on mobile devices.
- OpenAI launched a lightweight exploration model powered by o4-mini, designed to push usability boundaries — reportedly “several times smarter” and much cheaper to run.
- Digital publisher Ziff Davis has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing it of stealing content from platforms like Mashable, PCMag, and IGN to train its models.
- Moonshot AI has released Kimi-Audio, a new open-source SOTA audio model featuring speech recognition, audio-to-text, and speech-to-speech capabilities.
- Figure AI and United Parcel Service (UPS) are reportedly in talks about a partnership to deploy humanoid robots in shipping and logistics operations.
Trending AI tools:
- Researcher & Analyst – Copilot agents designed for research and data science tasks.
- Kling 2.0 – Advanced generation and editing of AI videos and images.
- Retellio – An AI agent that turns customer call recordings into curated podcast-style summaries, highlighting key business insights for leadership.
