TikTok owner has become a leader in the AI ​​race to prepare for the decline of TikTok itself

ByteDance, which owns the popular short-video service TikTok, has managed to lure top engineers and artificial intelligence researchers from Alibaba and a number of startups such as 01.ai and Zhipu over the past few months. In addition, the company has expanded teams working on large language models and AI products. All this helped it become one of the leaders in the field of AI in the home market.

Image source: ByteDance

ByteDance is investing billions of dollars in developing its own infrastructure, which ensures the operation of AI algorithms. Over the past two years, the company has purchased enough Nvidia AI accelerators to enable it to build cutting-edge large language models. This comes at a challenging time for the company, which was recently valued at around $300 billion.

The growth of Douyin, TikTok’s equivalent for the Chinese market, has reached saturation point. At the same time, there are signs of TikTok’s growth slowing in some key markets. This week, the US Court of Appeals upheld a law forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok in the country. The decision to sell must be made in January or the platform may be blocked in the country.

ByteDance has achieved significant success in the field of AI thanks to close commercial cooperation with Nvidia. However, for its Chinese data centers, the company can only buy not the most advanced H20 AI accelerators, since the American authorities have banned the supply of the most powerful video cards to the Middle Kingdom. At the same time, ByteDance has the opportunity to purchase advanced H100 accelerators to expand its own computing capabilities outside of China. According to knowledgeable sources, ByteDance has become Nvidia’s largest Chinese customer in the home market, as well as the largest buyer of AI accelerators in Asia.

All this helped ByteDance create the most popular AI chatbot in China called Doubao. The algorithm became publicly available last August, about five months after the launch of Baidu’s Ernie chatbot. By November this year, Doubao was used by 60 million people every month. By comparison, the Wenxiaoyan bot, a rebranded version of Ernie, was used by about 13 million people in November. However, this is still significantly lower than the world’s most popular chatbot, ChatGPT, which, according to OpenAI, is used by 300 million people weekly.

Image source: starline/freepik.com

Experts note that the main feature of Doubao is that within one application the developers were able to combine various AI functions, including a search engine, translator, image and video generator. ByteDance has also released a global version of its AI bot, which is known outside China as Cici AI and is powered by large third-party language models.

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming, who stepped down as the company’s CEO in 2021, is still actively involved in the AI ​​strategy, according to insiders. According to the source, he personally oversees the process of hiring engineers and researchers from competing Chinese companies. The billionaire has repeatedly said that he wants to create strong AI (Artificial General Intelligence, AGI), i.e. an algorithm capable of solving problems just like a human. Insiders say Zhang Yiming continues to actively work towards this goal.

The report says that ByteDance has created a division whose employees are working on creating their own AI chip. It was formed after it managed to lure several talented and promising developers from Chinese semiconductor companies. The unit is developing its own AI ASIC to perform machine learning tasks, the source said.

«Yiming sees ByteDance needing a new growth engine after Douyin and TikTok. He is always thinking about what will happen in the next five years, which can expand the company’s business in the future,” said a knowledgeable source.