ByteDance And DeepSek Encourage AI Progress In China

Doubao-1.5-pro offers better capabilities than OpenAI's o1 (photo: x @Synced_Global)

JAKARTA - TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, launched its flagship AI model update, Doubao-1.5-pro, to challenge Microsoft-backed AI models. This move marks the acceleration of global competition in the development of AI models capable of solving complex problems.

Doubao-1.5-pro offers better capabilities than OpenAI's o1 in AIME tests, which measure AI's understanding and response to complex instructions. This update is ByteDance's strategic step to strengthen its position in the global AI market.

Previously, China's AI startup DeepSek launched the Open-source DeepSek-R1 AI model rivaling OpenAI's o1 in several performance benchmarks. DeepSek also drew global attention after tests showed their large V3 language models outperform OpenAI and Meta models at lower development costs.

Global AI Competition

This AI development by ByteDance, DeepSek, and others is likely to challenge OpenAI's market share and other big language models in terms of performance and cost. Other Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI, Minimax, and iFlyTek also launched their own AI models.

OpenAI sparked the race after launching ChatGPT in November 2022 and the AI series "Strawberry" in September last year.

DeepSek-R1 offers a price of 16 yuan ($2.20) per million tokens, much lower than OpenAI's o1 which costs 438 yuan. ByteDance offers a more competitive price with Doubao-1.5-pro-32k for 2 yuan per million tokens and Doubao-1.5-pro-256k for 9 yuan.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the company will launch a new AI model, the mini o3, in the coming weeks. The move shows that global AI competition is getting tighter.