In the AI-native era, ByteDance wants to replicate its third growth miracle

The development and promotion of AI--various APPs have been invented and applied

2024 is known as the "first year of AI application" in the industry, and ByteDance's pace of AI layout has clearly accelerated.

In the past year, ByteDance has launched more than ten AI applications, covering multiple fields such as agent customization, chat, social networking, images, video, office, education, and even hardware products.

In the era of mobile Internet, ByteDance is known as the "APP factory", so it has successively created two popular products, Toutiao and Douyin, and has become one of the most profitable Chinese Internet companies.

In the era of big models, they also have to create new growth miracles and look for the possibility of the third super application.

This is not ByteDance’s patent. In the year of the AIGC wave, companies that focus on big models all conceive, plan and implement this way.

At an industry conference in May this year, XiaoIce CEO Li Di mentioned that "the current commercial value of AI has shifted from pure technology output to realizing profits through high value-added products."

Earlier, Zhu Xiaohu was also very realistic when he was interviewed by Tencent News. He believed in applications that could be commercialized immediately for AGI (artificial general intelligence). But he didn't know at what point the big model would lead to the explosion of to C applications. He just said, "To C applications must be rigidly needed and high-frequency, so that they can have a chance to survive in the long run."

Just like the competition for tickets to the mobile Internet, everyone is now aiming for tickets to the AI ​​era. Of course, ByteDance also knows that this is the stage of placing bets, so exploratory layout is particularly important.

01 ByteDance needs TikTok in the AI ​​era

In the past year, Chatbot, AI virtual social networking, and AI Agent have been the three major product areas hotly discussed in the AI ​​circle, and ByteDance has not missed any of them.

In addition to Doubao, an intelligent conversation product that competes with ChatGPT and Kimi; Xingye's "Cat Box" (formerly "Talk Room"), which is positioned as "AI virtual character chat, interactive social networking"; and the AI ​​Bot development platform Coze, which competes with the ‌GPT Store launched by OpenAI.

This is the result of an internal competition among multiple AI teams. Bytedance has always been known for launching products quickly in a short period of time, and then testing them in the market to eliminate the weak and eliminate the weak. In the era of mobile Internet, Bytedance is known as the "App Factory". According to statistics from LatePost, from 2018 to 2020, Bytedance developed/acquired a large number of projects, and launched about 140 applications on the App Store.

Whether within the ByteDance system or in the AI ​​industry, Doubao is at the forefront of exploration with the largest user base.

Moreover, Doubao carries ByteDance's ambition in the AI ​​era - to create popular, national-level applications like Toutiao and Douyin.

In short, Doubao is a universal product that is both a productivity change tool and an emotional companion. Even the app has the same name as the big model, both of which are Doubao.

Therefore, Doubao is an AI bot developed based on the Doubao large model (formerly the Yunlark large model). It can realize AI intelligent chat, dialogue, and question-and-answer tools. It has pre-made multiple intelligent agents and supports multiple scenarios such as learning, life, and emotions. It also allows users to customize their own AI agents.

QuestMobile data shows that as of July this year, the monthly active user scale of AI native applications (also known as APPs) has exceeded 66.3 million. Among them, Doubao ranks first with 30.42 million monthly active users, which is more than 20 million more than Baidu's Wen Xiaoyan.

This is the result of ByteDance's belief that great efforts can bring about miracles. On Douyin, you can't see any AI application ads, except Doubao. It is said that ByteDance has almost blocked all ads of similar products on Douyin, leaving the opportunity for massive user conversion to Doubao.

In addition to AI native applications such as Doubao and Xingye, ByteDance is incubating some new applications based on existing products according to its own business characteristics and even strategic needs, the most typical of which is Jimeng.

As the world's largest short video platform, ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo once warned internally that "AI technology will have a great impact on content creation and may even create new creation platforms." Especially after Sora's emergence, the storm of Wensheng Video may further impact Douyin's existing industry position.

What if the Chinese version of Sora is not from ByteDance, but from other creative platforms? And what if this happens again and again? The consequence is that Douyin will lose its entry point for video creation. Over time, it may even lose its entry point for publishing.

This is an important background for Zhang Nan's transfer to Jianying. Jimeng is an AI video generation application launched by the Jianying business team under her charge.

However, judging from the feedback, this new product still has a long way to go before it is widely accepted by users. As of October 15 this year, Qimai data showed that the cumulative downloads of Jimeng AI were 791,400. In addition, the average daily downloads of this product in the past 30 days were 22,978 times.

Judging from the timeline, the prototype of Dreamina was launched earlier than Kuaishou Keling, but the latter gained more attention. An unconfirmed news is that Keling's revenue has exceeded 10 million, and the company even cut a cake to celebrate. In the era of big models, the possibility of changes in the video industry has increased.

Doubao in the left hand and Jianying in the right hand are the two trump cards that ByteDance has quickly played in the era of big models. One is a pure AI native application, and the other is an evolutionary iteration based on the existing core business. In essence, both are striving for a ticket to the AI ​​era.

02 APP factory is still going on

Doubao and Jimeng are just two of ByteDance's star products that have invested in AI applications. The APP factory in this mobile era is still making extensive layouts.

And they are promoting the whole industry chain. From the bottom most basic model layer, to the middle connection layer for performance optimization and matching, to the final C-end application layer, ByteDance is fully involved and covered.

According to incomplete statistics from Newberry Daybreak, from August last year to date, ByteDance has launched a total of 9 large models, including the Doubao large model family, 2 intelligent development platforms, and more than ten AI applications in the field of AI. In September, ByteDance even launched its first AI hardware product, the AI ​​intelligent headset Ola Friend, in an attempt to find a new entry point for AI in the hardware market.

According to the data list of "Feifan Industry Research", a business digitalization and innovation research center under Feifan Capital, apart from Baidu, ByteDance is currently the company with the largest number of AI products in China.

Compared with the two major companies, Baidu's AI product layout strategy is to cover popular categories and empower daily life scenarios, such as the AI ​​dialogue product Wenxin Yiyan, the Zhongguancun Online Technology Life Museum connected to Baidu's facial recognition technology, and the integration of Baidu's AI technology to build an intelligent ticketing system for scenic spots.

ByteDance focuses more on high-frequency usage scenarios in popular market sectors, such as image/video generation, chat, social networking, office, education, music and other fields.

According to incomplete statistics from NewBerry Daybreak, since the beginning of this year, ByteDance has updated or launched eight AI application products, including Button, Cat Box, Star Painting, and Hippo Love Learning, and most of them were launched in the first half of this year.

It is worth noting that these incubated and updated products are not produced by only one team. In addition to Flow, the AI ​​innovation business department focusing on the application layer, business departments such as Jianying, Toutiao, Dali Education, and Bytedance are also focusing on AI. The products currently launched by these teams focus on image/video, office, education, e-commerce content creation and other fields.

In addition, ByteDance's AI product strategy has another typical feature, just like in the mobile Internet era, it pays more attention to the simultaneous layout at home and abroad. There is Doubao in China and Cici overseas; there is Button in China and Coze overseas; there is Cat Box in China and BagelBelI overseas...

Among them, ByteDance's overseas products Gauth, Cici AI, and Hypic all entered the top 30 of the global APP download list in September 2024.

Moreover, ByteDance is trying to capture both the C-end and the B-end. A typical example is the Agent customization product "Button" that is aimed at both C-end and B-end developers.

In addition to large models, Agent is another widely discussed concept. The common understanding in the industry is that "AI agent is a way to combine AI with specific application scenarios. Large models require Agent to achieve functional expansion."

"Button" is currently the product with the largest user scale and the most popular brand in the field of Agent application development platform. According to data from the third-party platform Similarweb, as of June 2024, the number of monthly visiting users of "Button" will reach about 2 million.

At the beginning of the launch, a Zhihu user shared his actual experience of using Button. "The text-based conversation experience is very good. The speed response is faster and smoother than the native GPT4. It also supports deployment to Discord as an agent. However, the multimodality is quite buggy. There are basically problems with the uploaded text and images. It is completely unusable."

Despite the numerous problems, it still did not stop the enthusiasm of major manufacturers to launch Agent development platforms.

Baidu Smart Cloud Qianfan APPBuilder was launched on October 17, 2023, and is the earliest product to go online. Baidu's second quarter financial report data this year shows that the number of applications built by App Builder has reached hundreds of thousands. Tencent Yuanqi was launched in May this year, but the user scale has not been announced yet. However, the intelligent bodies created by users can be distributed to Tencent's entire domain, such as QQ, WeChat customer service, and WeChat public accounts, with one click.

All core areas must be covered, both domestically and overseas, and both C-end and B-end must be covered. The premise for ByteDance's product layout strategy to be effective is that the large model base is strong enough.

03 Is the large model base sufficient to support ByteDance’s ambitions?

While ByteDance is busy laying out its applications, the Doubao model is also being updated rapidly.

In August 2023, ByteDance launched a large-scale pre-trained language model, the Skylark Big Model, which is positioned as an AI big model for natural language content generation and content understanding. Doubao was developed based on this model. Seven months later, the Skylark Big Model was upgraded to the Doubao Big Model family, and 9 Doubao models were released at once.

ByteDance's big models are updated about every two months. In May this year, ByteDance Volcano Engine first launched a family of nine Doubao big models, and two months later, it released the Doubao·Graphics model; and in September this year, it launched two Doubao·Video generation models, PixelDance and Seaweed.

As of now, the Doubao model family has collected 13 models in total, including text, voice, pictures, music, videos, etc.

In May this year, Tan Dai, president of Volcano Engine, mentioned in an interview with Huxiu that ByteDance's model is constantly evolving, and once it evolves to a certain level, it is possible to develop applications on it. ByteDance's two top-level AI native applications, Button and Doubao, are both based on the Doubao large model.

Tan Dai also mentioned the reason why Byte released the Doubao model relatively late, "Because Doubao has reached the point where everyone can use it for applications. Only when more and more people develop more applications can it in turn drive technological progress and form a positive cycle."

Recently, Silicon Star quoted a ByteDance insider to explain the Doubao model, "The current Doubao is more like a unified outlet that connects users. The backend of the Doubao product is connected to multiple model tests and is a training ground. The model effect is evaluated through the result feedback of the API, but it is difficult to make a choice at the moment."

In addition, the "Volcano Engine", positioned as ByteDance's ToB cloud platform, shoulders the mission of ByteDance's digitalization in the B-end market. With the emergence of AI big models, "cloud service + big model" has become the focus of the transformation of the cloud service market.

At present, Volcano Engine has formed a set of product systems including cloud infrastructure, Doubao large model and Volcano Ark 2.0. On the one hand, it can help enterprises realize AI transformation, and on the other hand, it can provide internal blood transfusion.

For example, the Doubao video generation model released at the end of last month used Volcano Engine's large model training video preprocessing solution during training. The on-demand solution provided by the Volcano Engine Video Cloud team also ensures that the model can be commercially applied.

Within ByteDance, Volcano Engine positions itself as "making wedding clothes for others." Last year, Tan Dai said to the public, "Volcano Engine does not make large models itself, but first serves domestic companies that start large models."

At that time, he emphasized to the media that Volcano's mission is to provide computing power on the one hand and to build a cloud-native machine learning platform on the other hand to help companies make good use of computing power, further improve efficiency, and train large models quickly and stably.

We are in the year of the wave of AI big model application. While completing the commercial landing, the industry strives to become the "China OpenAI", and the construction of underlying capabilities is crucial.

Last month, when explaining why the video model was released at this time, Tan Dai mentioned that the model is a long-term thing that will affect the next ten or twenty years.

AI computing is rapidly penetrating into all walks of life, and an invisible revolution may be imminent in the near future. But at the same time, ByteDance's ambitions in the AI ​​era also need to be verified by the physical world.

The best time to plant a tree is firstly ten years ago, and secondly now.

Written by Li Huan Edited by Zhai Wenting