ByteDances Vidu Unveils AI Hollywood Studio to Democratize Video Creation

ByteDance Bets Big on AI 'Hollywood' as New Frontier in Tech Race

In a dual push underscoring its all-in ambition for the artificial intelligence era, ByteDance is making significant strides on both product and strategic fronts. Its video generation platform, Vidu, has launched a groundbreaking modular system for crafting AI videos, while company CEO Liang Rubo has internally declared the firm's "peak" ambition lies squarely in dominating the AI assistant landscape, signaling an intense phase of focused investment and competition.

The new feature from Vidu, termed the "Subject Community," represents a fundamental shift in how users interact with AI video generators. Moving beyond the traditional, often imprecise method of descriptive text prompting, the platform now offers a library of pre-defined, reusable modules—or "Subjects"—across eight categories: cinematography (like camera movements), visual effects, atmosphere, performance (actor expressions and emotions), composition, narrative, style, and specific actions or "moves."

Functionally, it allows users to construct complex video prompts by simply typing the "@" symbol and selecting from these standardized modules. For instance, a creator could combine "@dolly-in" + "@cyberpunk atmosphere" + "@particle effects" + [character image] to generate a specific scene. This modular approach, drawing clear inspiration from the "Skills" functionality seen in AI chatbots like Claude, aims to turn the AI from a black-box guesser into a predictable, tool-based collaborator.

Democratizing the Director's Chair

The implications for content creation are substantial. The "Performance" and "Expression" subjects directly address a longstanding weakness in AI-generated video: stiff and unconvincing human characters. The community library includes modules for specific emotions like "maniacal laughter," "terror," "sadness," and "joy," as well as choreographed actions like "duel fighting" or "romantic embrace."

In demonstrations, providing an image of a character and applying the "@maniacal laughter" subject resulted in a video where the character exhibited that specific, dynamic expression while maintaining visual consistency. Similarly, subjects for complex visual effects and action sequences—with names like "@Ice Rain Spell," "@Golden Bell Shield," or "@Hundred Flowers Confusion Clone"—enable the relatively easy generation of fantasy or action-packed scenes that would otherwise require highly specialized prompt engineering.

"Previously, people said AI would take jobs from Hollywood actors. Now, Vidu is directly giving every creator an AI Hollywood production studio. Actors, directors, cinematographers—all are AI, summoned with just an '@'," the platform's announcement claimed. This "Subject Community" is also positioned as a shareable, tradable, and interactive marketplace for these AI video components, potentially fostering a new layer of creator economy around prompt modules.

Corporate Strategy: Defining the "Peak" as AI

This product innovation arrives as ByteDance's leadership crystallizes its overarching AI strategy. At the company's first all-hands meeting of 2026, CEO Liang Rubo set the annual theme as "Courageously Scaling the Peak." He left little room for ambiguity about what constitutes that peak for the tech giant.

"For ByteDance, the 'peak' in the short term is the Doubao/Doula assistant application," Liang stated definitively. He framed the current AI wave as a monumental opportunity, at least on par with the advent of the personal computer plus the internet, and argued that the window to seize such "peak" opportunities is shortening. "The competition in the PC era lasted more than a decade... the time window for scaling the peak is getting shorter," he said, urging urgency.

Liang provided a candid assessment of ByteDance's current standing. He noted the company's foundation models are in China's first tier, and its image and video generation capabilities are in the international first tier. However, he acknowledged that Doubao, while growing rapidly in user base and improving in experience, "still lags behind the world's top peers."

The strategy to close this gap is two-pronged: achieving top-tier AI model capabilities and effectively integrating them into the assistant product. Liang also highlighted the significant opportunity in the business-to-business sector with MaaS (Model-as-a-Service), which he said is the fastest-growing business for ByteDance's cloud service, Volcano Engine. Excelling in both consumer-facing assistants and enterprise MaaS, he argued, is essential for pushing the boundaries of general model intelligence.

"Lead the Head": Doubling Down on Talent and Investment

Underpinning this strategic focus is a massive commitment to talent acquisition and retention. Liang emphasized that scaling the AI peak requires increasing "talent density" and enhancing incentives. He stated ByteDance's goal is to ensure employee compensation and incentive returns "lead the head level" in all global markets where it operates.

This rhetoric is backed by recent action. In December 2025, ByteDance announced a global overhaul of its compensation system, including a 35% increase in bonus and performance-based equity investment, a 1.5x increase in budget for salary adjustments, and raised salary floors and ceilings across all job levels. Liang framed human capital not as an expense but as an investment, where good returns equate to strong business performance and high employee rewards.

Beyond products and people, Liang outlined other pillars for the "peak climb": building world-class public trust through robust data privacy and safety standards, fostering healthy industry cooperation, maintaining strategic focus and integration across business units, and preserving an "Always Day 1" entrepreneurial culture.

Converging Paths: From Toolkits to Strategic Dominance

The simultaneous revelation of Vidu's advanced toolkit and ByteDance's clarified AI ambition is hardly coincidental. They represent two facets of the same campaign. Vidu's "Subject Community" can be seen as a tactical implementation of the "compute for intelligence" philosophy Liang described—using increased computational power and smarter systems to drastically improve user experience and creative potential. By abstracting complex video direction into simple, composable commands, it lowers the barrier to high-quality video production, aligning with the corporate mission to "inspire creation and enrich life."

Furthermore, developments in a cutting-edge area like AI video generation directly feed into the core model capabilities Liang identified as critical. Success here strengthens the company's standing in the "international first tier" for video models, which in turn bolsters both its consumer product offerings and its enterprise MaaS proposition.

The industry is witnessing a rapid maturation of AI competition. It is evolving from a race for raw benchmark scores and chatbot features into a more complex "system battle." This contest encompasses foundational model power, the development of accessible and powerful toolkits (like Vidu's Subjects), the integration of AI into flagship products, the ability to attract top-tier global talent, and the strategic clarity to focus resources on the highest-value opportunities. ByteDance, with its latest moves, is signaling its intent to be a full-spectrum contender in this new phase, aiming not just to participate but to define the peak of the AI era.