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TikTok owner ByteDance launches low-cost Doubao AI models for enterprises, initiating a price war in crowded mainland market
- Use of the Doubao large language model family is touted to cost 99.8 per cent less than OpenAI’s GPT-4 model
- The aggressive pricing for the Doubao LLMs show the increased opportunity in mainland China, where more firms are scrambling to adopt GenAI tools
The Doubao LLM family, which shares the same name as the Doubao chatbot that ByteDance introduced last year, is made up of at least eight versions. These include the top-of-the-line Doubao Pro, which can handle an input of up to 128,000 tokens, as well as the entry-level Doubao Lite and other versions specifically focused on recognising audio or creating virtual characters, the company announced at an event on Wednesday in Beijing.
Tan Dai, president of ByteDance’s cloud computing services unit Volcano Engine, said at the event that use of the Doubao Pro LLM costs as low as 0.0008 yuan (0.011 US cents) per 1,000-token prompt. In AI, a token is a fundamental unit of data that is processed by algorithms, which makes 1,000 tokens equivalent to about 750 English words.
![ByteDance’s icon for its Doubao large language model family. Photo: ByteDance](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/05/15/110be898-66c9-4676-b79d-bd8c10c0267d_13fea688.jpg)
![Sample code for an artificial intelligence large language model. Photo: Shutterstock](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/05/15/4f662879-077a-47cd-8642-710f43157c9a_72e616df.jpg)
ByteDance had tested its Doubao LLM family, previously code-named Skylark, internally and with selected partners for about a year, according to Volcano Engine’s Tan.
Apart from that low-cost LLM initiative, ByteDance also announced on Wednesday other AI-related efforts, including an enterprise version of its Coze platform that enables users to customise chatbots.
![The logo of Alibaba Group Holding’s Tongyi Qianwen large language model on a smartphone screen. Photo: Shutterstock](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/05/15/7ebfec64-32e8-4f3d-be03-b784d5f76130_df606f6d.jpg)
The firm’s Doubao app has amassed more than 26 million monthly active users, Alex Zhu, vice-president of ByteDance’s product and strategy department, said on Wednesday.
ByteDance, however, still has a lot of catching up to do on the mainland’s LLM market segment.
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