JAKARTA - ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, officially launched its latest artificial intelligence model, Doubao 2.0, on Saturday, February 14. This step was taken to update the AI application, which is currently the most widely used in China, as well as strengthening ByteDance's position amid fierce competition in the technology industry.
The launch comes ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, a time when many Chinese tech companies race to release new AI models to grab the attention of domestic and international users.
ByteDance is positioning Doubao 2.0 to enter the era of AI agents. Unlike the previous model which focuses on answering questions, this new model is designed to independently execute complex tasks in the real world.
According to ByteDance's official statement, the Pro version of this model has complex reasoning capabilities and multi-step task execution. The ability is claimed to be equivalent to OpenAI's GPT 5.2 and Google's Gemini 3 Pro.
Another major advantage is cost efficiency. ByteDance claims Doubao 2.0 is able to reduce the cost of using about one order of magnitude (about 10 times) compared to its competitors.
"This cost advantage will become even more crucial as complex real-world tasks involve large-scale inference and multi-step generation that will consume a large number of tokens," ByteDance wrote in its statement.
Tight Competition in the Chinese MarketThe launch of Doubao 2.0 is also aimed at preventing ByteDance from losing ground as it did last year, when DeepSeek emerged with an AI model equivalent to OpenAI but with a much lower production cost.
Currently, Doubao leads the AI chatbot app market in China with 155 million weekly active users, followed by DeepSeek with 81.6 million users, according to QuestMobile data as of the end of December.
However, Doubao is facing strong pressure from domestic competitors. Alibaba recently launched a coupon-sharing campaign worth 3 billion yuan (about 400 million US dollars) for its application, Qwen. Alibaba's aggressive move has caused Qwen's daily active users to skyrocket, approaching Doubao's user numbers.
In addition, ByteDance has also just released an AI video creation model, Seedance 2.0, which has gone viral on Chinese social media and has received praise from Elon Musk on the X platform.
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