A former Google employee involved in its AI video generation is reportedly joining TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, to help in its AI development team, according to the South China Morning Post.
Jiang Liu, a part-time professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is reported will be working under ByteDance's main intelligent creation technology for research on large language models.
Liu is among the major contributors in Google's VideoPoet, one of the tech giant's AI tools under research capable of "multitasking on a variety of video-centric inputs and outputs."
Before VideoPoet, Liu also worked on generative content and deep learning technologies used in Google Ads, YouTube, and Waymo.
ByteDance has yet to provide a statement regarding Liu's employment.
ByteDance Tries to Catch Up on AI Race
Since the AI boom last year, ByteDance has been playing catch up on the technology trend to be used across its digital platforms.
ByteDance Rubo Liang was earlier reported to be pushing staff to develop more AI features due to employees being "not sensitive enough to external changes" in the AI industry.
Liang warned that falling behind in the AI race risks the company being a "mediocre organization."
The company has already been noted to be developing its own chatbot platform, which OpenAI is accused using its technology to train its AI model.
Generative AI Video Models Trend After Sora AI
The report of ByteDance making more efforts to generative videos follows after the release of OpenAI's Sora AI.
OpenAI earlier touted the technology capable of generating high-quality 60-second videos nearing realistic visuals.
Other AI firms have also been ramping up development of their own text-to-video AI models to compete with Sora.
As of writing, Hugging Face and Anthropic reported improving their existing video-generating AIs to provide much more realistic results.
