Kuaishou goes full throttle on AI video tool

Chinese video-sharing platform Kuaishou Technology is doubling down on artificial intelligence-powered video generation models and plans to provide more data traffic support for premium content creators.

This is part of the company's efforts to accelerate its monetization push and improve the production of high-quality video content.

Cheng Yixiao, founder and CEO of Kuaishou, said more than 23 million content providers have gained income from the platform in the past year, while the number of creators earning more than 10,000 yuan ($1,407) each month have increased by 14 percent year-on-year.

Currently, Kuaishou has nearly 400 million daily active users, with the average number of works uploaded by content creators each day surpassing 40 million, and the number of active creators who have over 10,000 followers up 20 percent on a yearly basis, Cheng said.

The company has recently updated its self-developed Kling AI model, which comes with new features such as improved video quality, monthly subscription services for users, image-to-video and video extension capabilities. Currently, Kling has more than 1.6 million users and has generated over 16 million videos.

The move marks the latest effort by the short-video platform to step up commercialization of products in the highly competitive AI video generation market since US-based AI research company OpenAI, which pioneered the text-to-video AI models with the announcement of Sora in February, took the world by storm.

Released in June, Kling can process text into video clips of up to two minutes long with 1080p resolution, while supporting a variety of aspect ratios, Kuaishou said at the time. The model can interpret prompts to generate high-quality videos that mimic the physical world and create imaginative scenes from text instructions.

Kuaishou will continue to enhance the Kling AI model to further improve its performance, and explore more business-to-business or B2B monetization possibilities, aiming for significant gains in the near future, Cheng said in an earnings call after the company's second-quarter results announcement in August.

Moreover, the company will step up investments to offer data flow support and upgrade algorithms for content creators and livestreaming hosts. According to its latest financial results, gross merchandise volume, or GMV from e-commerce business grew by 15 percent year-on-year to 305.3 billion yuan in the second quarter.

Ma Shicong, an analyst with Beijing-based internet consultancy Analysys, said Kuaishou has accumulated ample experience and technical strengths in AI, video, livestreaming and algorithms over the past few years.

The company, Ma added, hopes to seek new sources of revenue and speed up its monetization efforts by expanding its footprint in the fast-developing AI-generated content segment amid fierce competition from local rivals such as Douyin.

"AIGC-related technologies will improve the productivity of content production and the process of developing text-to-video generation models necessitates higher requirements for computing capacity, algorithms and high-quality data," said Pan Helin, a member of the Expert Committee for Information and Communication Economy, which is under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

He said more efforts are needed to bolster the efficient circulation of data elements, and expand application scenarios of video generation models in a wider range of segments.

The number of netizens in China had reached nearly 1.1 billion as of June this year, with short-video users accounting for 95.5 percent of the total netizens, according to a report released by the China Internet Network Information Center.