China’s ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) has rolled out its Doubao 2.0 model, an upgrade of the country’s most widely used artificial-intelligence (AI) app, the company announced on Saturday. ByteDance is one of several Chinese firms hoping to generate overseas and domestic buzz around its new AI models during the Lunar New Year holiday, which began yesterday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese partake in family gatherings in their hometowns.
The company, like rival Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴), was caught off-guard by DeepSeek’s (深度求索) meteoric rise to global fame during last year’s Spring Festival, when Silicon Valley and investors worldwide were shocked by how a Chinese firm had come up with a model comparable to OpenAI’s best but seemingly developed at a fraction of the cost.
The release of Doubao 2.0, ahead of a highly anticipated new DeepSeek model, is likely aimed at preventing such a scenario from repeating itself. A video-generation AI model that ByteDance released on Thursday, Seedance 2.0, has already drawn comparisons with DeepSeek’s success last year after going viral on Chinese social media and drawing praise overseas on platforms such as X, including from its owner Elon Musk.
Photo: AFP
Doubao 2.0 is positioned for the “agent era,” where AI models are expected to execute complex real-world tasks rather than only answer questions, ByteDance said in a statement.
The model’s pro version includes complex reasoning and multi-step task execution capabilities that match OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, while reducing usage costs by roughly an order of magnitude, according to the company.
“This cost advantage will become even more crucial as real-world, complex tasks involve large-scale inference and multi-step generation that will expend a huge amount of tokens,” ByteDance said, referring to the unit of data processed by an AI model.
Doubao leads all AI chatbot apps in China with 155 million weekly active users, with DeepSeek second at 81.6 million, according to QuestMobile (貴士移動) in data published in December last year.
Doubao 2.0’s release could help ByteDance fend off pressure from domestic competitors. Alibaba on Feb. 6 announced it was spending 3 billion yuan (US$434.2 million) on a coupon giveaway campaign to attract more users to its Qwen AI app, allowing them to use the incentives to purchase food and drink directly in the chatbot.
This led daily active users on Qwen to spike from 7 million to 58 million, just 23 million shy of Doubao’s figures on the same day, according to QuestMobile.
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
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