A new artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by the Chinese company behind TikTok rocked Hollywood this week - not just because of what it can do, but what it could mean for creative industries. Created by tech giant ByteDance, Seedance 2.0 can generate cinema-quality video, complete with sound effects and dialogue, from just a few written prompts. Many of the clips said to have been made using Seedance, and featuring popular characters like Spider-Man and Deadpool, went viral. What is Seedance - and why the stir? Seedance was launched to little fanfare in June 2025 but it is the second version that came eight months later that has caused a major stir.

The United States trade deficit has widened sharply in December amid a surge in imports, and the goods shortfall in 2025 was the highest on record despite US President Donald Trump's tariffs on foreign-manufactured merchandise. The second straight monthly deterioration in the trade deficit reported by the US Commerce Department on Thursday suggested that trade made little or no contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) in the fourth quarter. The US deficit in the trade of goods widened 2 percent to a record $1.24 trillion last year as American companies boosted imports of computer chips and other tech goods from Taiwan to support massive investments in artificial intelligence. Amid continuing tensions with Beijing, the deficit in the goods trade with China plunged nearly 32 percent to $202bn in 2025 on a sharp drop in both exports to and imports from the world's second-biggest economy. But trade was diverted away from China.

We present a novel algorithm to estimate the barycenter of arbitrary probability distributions with respect to the Sinkhorn divergence. Based on a Frank-Wolfe optimization strategy, our approach proceeds by populating the support of the barycenter incrementally, without requiring any pre-allocation.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Then we introduce a semantic mapper that produces the proxy masks from various input conditions including semantic masks.

Results averaged over ResNet18 and ResNet50.

On TikTok, Chinese manufacturers are advertising signal-blocking weapons with the breezy cadence of consumer lifestyle advertising. "Pew, pew, pew!" a woman wearing sneakers and high-waisted pink trousers says cheerfully in a video uploaded to TikTok. She is standing on what appears to be an industrial rooftop while demonstrating how to use a black device resembling an oversized laser tag gun. "Jamming gun, good," she adds, flashing a thumbs up. These days, nearly any product imaginable is available for purchase on TikTok straight from Chinese factories, ranging from industrial chemicals to mystical crystals and custom pilates reformers.

Why was El Paso airspace shut down? Masked protesters arrested outside Trump's Board of Peace meeting NewsFeed Masked protesters arrested outside Trump's Board of Peace meeting Pro-Palestinian protesters gathered in downtown Washington, DC, outside Donald Trump's Board of Peace event, with some wearing masks of Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Marco Rubio. Several were shoved and arrested by police. Palestinians in Gaza say'Board of Peace' will further occupation OpenAI's Sam Altman: Global AI regulation'urgently' needed Gaza'stabilization force' commander outlines security plans Trump praises'magnificent' B-2 bombers that struck Iran in 2025 Jordan-Israel relationship'at its worst' after West Bank plans Trump's'Board of Peace' convenes for first time