(Yicai) July 30 -- Shengshu AI, a Chinese developer of generative artificial intelligence technology, has made its text- and picture-to-video tool available to the public worldwide, joining other Chinese startups that offer rival products to OpenAI’s Sora.

Vidu, available on Vidu.studio, can generate five- or eight-second videos of 1080-pixel quality from either text in Chinese and English or picture content.

Shengshu AI was founded in Beijing in March last year by a team from the Institute for AI Industry Research at Tsinghua University. After one month, Shengshu AI and Tsinghua University co-launched Vidu.

Shengshu AI co-founder and Chief Executive Tang Jiayu demonstrated Vidu's applications in the anime, comic, and gaming fields at the four-day China Joy ended yesterday.

Vidu was used to create Last Robot, the first three-dimensional short animation film made with AI technologies, and digitally restore cultural relics, such as wall paintings in the Yongle Palace in Ruicheng, located in China’s southwestern Shanxi province.

Another Chinese AI startup that recently unveiled its video generator tool is Zhipu AI. Founded in June 2019, Zhipu AI originated in the knowledge engineering group at Tsinghua University's computer science and technology department. The startup has gradually developed AI models and product matrices covering text, code, images, and customized prompts.

On June 26, Zhipu AI CEO Zhang Peng announced that its AI-powered video generation tool Ying had been made available on computers, as well as on ChatGLM's mobile app and mini-program. Ying can generate six-second clips from text or pictures in 30 seconds.

Ying's application programming interface became available on large language model platform Bigmodel.cn for companies and developers on the same day.

Editor: Futura Costaglione