TikTok parent ByteDance has turned up the heat in the Chinese generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) market by slashing the price of a new AI model with "visual understanding" capabilities and launching a slew of product updates.
The new model, part of the company's popular Doubao family, was introduced at 0.003 yuan (US$0.00041) per thousand token uses, Tan Dai, president of ByteDance's Volcano Engine cloud unit, said at a corporate event on Wednesday.
Tokens are the standard billing units for using AI models through an application programming interface (API). At that price, which is 85 per cent lower than the industry average, a user would only need to spend 1 yuan to process up to 284 high-definition images.
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ByteDance's ultra-low pricing for its advanced AI model, which is capable of understanding text, physical objects, and spatial relationships in images, along with enhanced reasoning abilities, underscores growing rivalry in the Chinese market, where Big Tech firms and deep-pocketed start-ups have locked horns in a brutal price war to woo customers.
ByteDance cloud unit head Tan Dai announces the price cut for its Doubao model at an event on Wednesday. Photo: Handout alt=ByteDance cloud unit head Tan Dai announces the price cut for its Doubao model at an event on Wednesday. Photo: Handout>
Starting midyear, Chinese tech firms, from giants like Alibaba Group Holding, Baidu, ByteDance and Tencent Holdings, to start-ups such as Zhipu AI, drastically cut prices for using their AI models through APIs, with a few even giving their basic services away for free with some conditions. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
The average daily token use of Doubao models has reached 4 trillion, a 33-fold increase from May, Tan said, according to a video of the event posted on the website of ByteDance's cloud unit.
Tan said that affordable pricing paired with Doubao's ability to visually perceive and comprehend its surroundings, would unlock various use cases in education, e-commerce, tourism, logistics and transport, among others.
The Doubao chatbot has surged to become China's most-popular, with 60 million monthly active users last month, according to traffic analytics service Aicpb.com. On Wednesday, ByteDance also announced iterations to a bevy of its AI models and products.