3 min learnNew DelhiFeb 15, 2026 09:43 AM IST
China’s ByteDance has rolled out its Doubao 2.0 mannequin, an improve of the nation’s most generally used artificial-intelligence app, the corporate mentioned on Saturday. ByteDance is one among a number of Chinese language corporations hoping to generate abroad and home buzz round its new AI fashions throughout the Lunar New Yr vacation, which begins on Sunday, when tons of of thousands and thousands of Chinese language partake in household gatherings of their hometowns.
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The corporate, like rival Alibaba, was caught off-guard by DeepSeek’s meteoric rise to international fame throughout final yr’s Spring Competition, when Silicon Valley and traders worldwide had been shocked by how a Chinese language agency had come up with a mannequin akin to OpenAI’s greatest however seemingly developed at a fraction of the fee.
The discharge of Doubao 2.0, forward of a extremely anticipated new DeepSeek mannequin, is probably going aimed toward stopping such a state of affairs from repeating itself. A video-generation AI mannequin that ByteDance launched on Thursday, Seedance 2.0, has already drawn comparisons with DeepSeek’s success final yr after going viral on Chinese language social media and drawing reward abroad on platforms like X, together with from its proprietor Elon Musk.
Doubao 2.0 is positioned for the “agent period”, the place AI fashions are anticipated to execute advanced real-world duties somewhat than solely reply questions, ByteDance mentioned in an announcement.
The mannequin’s professional model contains advanced reasoning and multi-step process execution capabilities that match OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 and Google’s Gemini 3 Professional, whereas decreasing utilization prices by roughly an order of magnitude, in line with the corporate.
“This price benefit will turn out to be even extra essential as real-world, advanced duties contain large-scale inference and multi-step era that can expend an enormous quantity of tokens,” ByteDance mentioned, referring to the unit of information processed by an AI mannequin.
Doubao leads all AI chatbot apps in China with 155 million weekly lively customers, with DeepSeek second at 81.6 million, in line with info supplier QuestMobile’s most up-to-date knowledge, revealed in late December.
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However Doubao 2.0’s launch may assist ByteDance fend off current stress from home rivals. Alibaba on February 6 introduced it was spending 3 billion yuan ($400 million) on a coupon giveaway marketing campaign to draw extra customers to its Qwen AI app, permitting them to make use of the incentives to buy food and drinks immediately within the chatbot.
This led each day lively customers on Qwen to skyrocket from 7 million to 58 million, simply 23 million shy of Doubao’s figures on the identical day, in line with QuestMobile.