big spender
Shen Qiajin is the founder of ideaFlow, an interactive content generation platform that is a heavy user of ByteDance AI models.
“They have an all-in approach with AI and are the most aggressive player in the market,” he told AFP.
ByteDance, which has the largest AI team in China’s tech industry, sometimes pays two to three times the market average to recruit top talent, according to industry headhunter Shen Wei.
“From a headhunter’s perspective, ByteDance’s advantage is its willingness to spend a lot of money,” he said.
ByteDance has made no secret of its intentions to replicate TikTok’s international success with its AI venture.
The Doubao team is currently led by Alex Zhu. He is the co-founder of the lip-syncing app Musical.ly, which later merged with TikTok.
This app is called Dola (formerly Cici) overseas. Like TikTok, ByteDance’s AI services could face “concerns about data governance and geopolitical frictions,” Forrester’s Dai said.
While TikTok has taken over a niche, untapped market, Western AI giants are “very familiar with local regulatory frameworks and user demands,” said QuestMobile’s Chen.
Competition is intensifying at home as well. Tencent and Alibaba ran aggressive Lunar New Year promotions that propelled their chatbots to the top of Apple’s free apps chart.
Like many tech companies, ByteDance is under pressure to monetize its AI chatbot app operations.
“The real challenge for Doubao will only come after the number of daily active users exceeds 100 million,” a Doubao staff member told Chinese tech media outlet Late Post.
