TikTok Owner ByteDance Releases New AI Model

By Liam Mo and Brenda Goh
BEIJING (Reuters) – TikTok owner ByteDance announced on Wednesday the release of an update to its flagship AI model aimed at competing with Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s rationale products. The release comes amid an intensifying global race to develop AI models capable of solving complex issues.

The company unveiled Doubao-1.5-pro, an upgraded version of its flagship AI model, claiming it outperforms OpenAI’s o1 on AIME, a benchmark test designed to evaluate how well AI models comprehend and respond to intricate instructions.

ByteDance’s announcement follows a similar move by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which launched an open-source reasoning model named DeepSeek-R1 on Monday, asserting that it also rivals OpenAI’s o1 on various performance metrics.

Last month, DeepSeek garnered significant attention in global AI discussions after demonstrating that its V3 large language model surpassed those of OpenAI and Meta, despite having a smaller development budget and intending to charge significantly lower fees.

The advancements in AI reasoning from ByteDance, DeepSeek, and other firms are expected to challenge the market share held by OpenAI and various large language models regarding both performance and user fees.

In recent weeks, other Chinese companies like Moonshot AI, Minimax, and iFlyTek have also introduced their own reasoning models.

The competitive landscape in AI development was sparked by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, followed by its Strawberry series of AI reasoning models in September of the previous year, which are adept at handling complex tasks in science, coding, and mathematics.

Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the finalization of a new version of its reasoning AI model o3 mini, set for launch in the upcoming weeks.

DeepSeek is offering an attractive price for accessing DeepSeek-R1 at 16 yuan ($2.20) per million tokens, significantly undercutting OpenAI’s o1 priced at 438 yuan for similar usage.

ByteDance’s pricing is even more competitive; Doubao-1.5-pro-32k is priced at 2 yuan per million tokens for output, while the more robust Doubao-1.5-pro-256k version costs 9 yuan, according to ByteDance’s cloud platform Volcano Engine.

($1 = 7.2798 Chinese yuan renminbi)