Chinese AI Videos Used to Look Fake. Now They Look Like Money

Even six months ago, artificial intelligence-generated videos still betrayed themselves, with extra fingers, jerky limbs and uncanny facial expressions. While some of that persists, for the most part, we’ve entered an era where seeing is no longer believing.

It isn’t just the quality that has changed. In China, AI video is doing something else that once looked unlikely: making money. While attention remains fixed on the race to build massive foundation models like DeepSeek’s, the real contest is shifting to AI products that people will pay for and the search for a killer AI app. Early evidence from Kuaishou Technology suggests the winner may not be a chatbot at all, but a video tool.