ByteDance rolls out newest model for flagship AI appAUSPICIOUS TIMING: Ostensibly looking to spike the guns of domestic rivals, ByteDance launched the upgrade to coincide with the Lunar New YearReuters, BEIJINGChina’s ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) has rolled out its Doubao 2.0 model, an upgrade of the country’s most widely used artificial-intelligence (AI) app, the company announced on Saturday. The release of Doubao 2.0, ahead of a highly anticipated new DeepSeek model, is likely aimed at preventing such a scenario from repeating itself. A video-generation AI model that ByteDance released on Thursday, Seedance 2.0, has already drawn comparisons with DeepSeek’s success last year after going viral on Chinese social media and drawing praise overseas on platforms such as X, including from its owner Elon Musk. Photo: AFPDoubao 2.0 is positioned for the “agent era,” where AI models are expected to execute complex real-world tasks rather than only answer questions, ByteDance said in a statement. “This cost advantage will become even more crucial as real-world, complex tasks involve large-scale inference and multi-step generation that will expend a huge amount of tokens,” ByteDance said, referring to the unit of data processed by an AI model.

Source: Taipei Times February 15, 2026 17:15 UTC