Doubao Starts to Raise Prices, ByteDance's AI Costs Become a Burden
JAKARTA - Doubao, an artificial intelligence (AI) application owned by ByteDance, has started to enter the paid model. China's largest AI application confirmed the launch of a premium service for professional users.
Quoted from Yicai, Thursday, June 4, Doubao's professional services will include software development, data analysis, professional design, workflow automation, financial analysis, to scientific research.
In a statement on its official WeChat account, Doubao said the professional service would be available for free on a limited basis. After that, users will be charged a subscription fee.
However, the features for general users remain free. The search, question and answer, image creation, and voice and video chat services can still be used at no cost.
The paid service signal has appeared since the beginning of May. At that time, Doubao updated the in-app purchase information on the Apple App Store and added three subscription packages.
The standard package is priced at 688 yuan or around US$102 per year. The enhanced package is priced at 2,048 yuan or around US$302 per year. The professional package is priced at 5,088 yuan or around US$750 per year.
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According to Aicpb.Com, the number of monthly active users of Doubao fell 1.8 percent to 330 million users in May compared to April. This is the first decline in the number of users of the application.
Even so, Doubao is still the largest AI app in China.
Data from Aicpb.Com shows that Doubao is still far ahead of the two AI applications owned by the Alibaba Group. Qwen has 233.7 million monthly active users, while Quark has recorded 162.1 million monthly active users.
Yicai also reported that the high cost of computing was allegedly one of the reasons why Doubao started offering paid services.
According to AI industry analysis company Xsignal, Doubao's token inference costs are estimated at 8 billion yuan or about US$1.2 billion per year. Token inference is the process when an AI model processes a user request and generates an answer.
The cost of chips and computing power to run the service is even estimated to reach tens of billions of yuan per year.
The size of AI investment is also said to burden ByteDance's profits. Citing sources familiar with the company's condition, Yicai reported that ByteDance's net profit last year shrank by about 70 percent to around US$9 billion compared to the previous year.
The decline was attributed to large investments in AI technology in the third and fourth quarters of last year. The investment includes the purchase of computing power, infrastructure development, and research and development.
ByteDance has not confirmed the net profit figure.