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Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING, Feb 14 (Reuters) – China’s ByteDance said on Saturday it has launched the Doubao 2.0 model, an upgraded version of the country’s most widely used artificial intelligence application.
ByteDance is one of several Chinese companies hoping to make a splash overseas and at home during the Lunar New Year holiday, which begins Sunday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese people attend family gatherings in their hometowns.
Like rival Alibaba, the company was caught off guard by DeepSeek’s meteoric rise to global fame during last year’s Spring Festival, when investors in Silicon Valley and around the world were stunned at how a Chinese company could come up with a model that rivaled OpenAI’s best but appeared to cost a fraction of the development cost.
Releasing Doubao 2.0 ahead of the highly anticipated new DeepSeek model is likely to prevent this situation from happening again.
Seedance 2.0, a video-generating artificial intelligence model released by ByteDance on Thursday, went viral on Chinese social media and received rave reviews on overseas platforms such as X, including praise from its owner Elon Musk, already matching the success of last year’s DeepSeek.
ByteDance said in a statement that Doubao 2.0 is positioned in the “agent era,” where artificial intelligence models are expected to perform complex real-world tasks rather than just answer questions.
The professional version of the model includes complex reasoning and multi-step task execution capabilities that match OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, while reducing the cost of use by approximately an order of magnitude, the company said.
“This cost advantage will become even more important as complex tasks in the real world involve large-scale inference and multi-step generation, which will consume large amounts of tokens,” ByteDance said, referring to the units of data processed by AI models.
According to the latest data released by information provider QuestMobile at the end of December, Doubao ranks first among all artificial intelligence chatbot applications in China with 155 million weekly active users, while DeepSeek ranks second with 81.6 million.
But the release of Doubao 2.0 can help Bytedance resist recent pressure from domestic competitors.
Alibaba announced on February 6 that it would spend 3 billion yuan ($400 million) on a coupon giveaway campaign to attract more users to its Qwen AI app, allowing them to use rewards to purchase food and drinks directly within the chatbot.
According to QuestMobile, this caused Qwen’s daily active users to jump from 7 million to 58 million, which was only 23 million less than Doubao’s number that day.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Additional reporting by Kevin Yao; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
