Ailing Zeng has joined Bilibili to lead its video generation business, reporting to CEO Rui Chen.
Her background aligns with Bilibili’s stated artificial intelligence priorities, which include video understanding, video recommendation, and AI-assisted video creation.
According to Zeng’s personal website, she spent three years working with Tencent’s Hunyuan and AI Lab teams and the International Digital Economy Academy, or IDEA. At IDEA, she led a research team focused on human-centric perception and generation.
She later joined Anuttacon, an AI company founded by Mihoyo founder Haoyu Cai. Mihoyo operates internationally under the Hoyoverse brand. At Anuttacon, Zeng was responsible for developing human-centric, interactive multimodal video generation systems.
Zeng earned a doctorate from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She was also a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.
Her appointment follows a brief leadership stint at Bilibili by Zhang Di, a former Kuaishou vice president and former head of the technical team at its Kling AI business unit.
Zhang joined Bilibili in September 2025 to oversee its technology operations. About two months later, he left and returned to Alibaba Group as head of the Future Life Lab at Taobao and Tmall Group. Zhang and his team developed HappyHorse-1.0 five months later.
Bilibili launched Index, a foundation model, in 2024. The company has primarily applied the model to video content creation, understanding, and distribution. It has also used Index to develop models for role-playing, speech generation, and anime video generation.
In March this year, Bilibili launched Updream, an AI video creation platform with long-term memory, a personalized skill library, and a free-form canvas. Bilibili describes the platform as a professional-grade AI content production pipeline.
The company has also introduced competitions and incentive programs to encourage creators to use AI tools.
At the start of 2026, it launched its first AI creation competition. When Bilibili introduced Updream in March, it awarded the competition’s first-prize winner, a creator on the platform, RMB 1 million.
Bilibili followed in June with the “Build in Bilibili” AI creation open competition. Entrants must use AI tools to create a functional, interactive product and publish videos documenting the development process on Bilibili.
The competition has no fixed category or theme. Both physical products and software applications are eligible.
Bilibili has placed part of the judging process in the hands of its users. They can support entries by using the platform’s virtual coin feature, posting bullet comments, which appear over videos as they play, and engaging with the projects through other platform features.
The competition offers a cash prize pool of more than RMB 1.3 million (USD 192,313.4), including RMB 1 million for the overall winner.
One month after the competition began, nearly 5,000 creators had submitted entries. Average daily searches on Bilibili for terms related to “vibe coding,” a method of building software through natural language prompts, had increased sixfold.
In July, Bilibili launched Toy, a web content publishing platform. Toy allows users to publish locally developed web pages with one click and turn them into interactive works that can be accessed directly through Bilibili.
Creators can use Toy to publish projects developed independently or with AI agents, vibe coding, and other AI tools. The resulting content can be played, tested, used, or watched on Bilibili.
During internal testing in June and July, creators uploaded more than 300 works to Toy. They included games, interactive narratives, tools, tests, reports, and illustrated collections.
Bilibili said users interacted with works on the platform more than 8.5 million times during the testing period.
Other AI-related initiatives include an AI producer program organized with the Astana AI Film Festival and an incentive program encouraging creators to use Updream to produce AI-generated animation.
According to Bilibili, searches on its platform for terms related to general-purpose AI agents and AI entrepreneurship increased by more than 500% year-on-year in 2026. In the second quarter, more than 190 million users watched AI-related content on Bilibili each month.
Bilibili has also incorporated AI into its advertising delivery and recommendation systems. It offers services including advertising creative generation, ad placement, automated campaign management, and trials of embedded AI advertising.
The company said AI-generated advertising materials accounted for more than 50% of ad spending and produced double-digit growth in click-through rates compared with conventional materials. Automated advertising accounted for more than 85% of ad spending, according to Bilibili.
KrASIA features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Wang Yuchan for 36Kr.
Note: RMB figures are converted to USD at rates of RMB 6.76 = USD 1 based on estimates as of August 3, 2026, unless otherwise stated. USD conversions are presented for ease of reference and may not fully match prevailing exchange rates.