China’s ByteDance releases Doubao 2.0 AI model for ‘agent era’

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By Eduardo Baptista

BEIJING, Feb 14 (Reuters) – China’s ByteDance has rolled out its Doubao 2.0 model, an upgrade of the country’s most widely used artificial-intelligence app, the company said on Saturday.

ByteDance is one of several Chinese firms hoping to generate overseas and domestic buzz around its new AI models during the Lunar New Year holiday, which starts on Sunday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese partake in family gatherings in their hometowns. 

The company, like rival Alibaba, was caught off-guard by DeepSeek’s meteoric rise to global fame during last year’s Spring Festival, when Silicon Valley and investors worldwide were shocked by how a Chinese firm had come up with a model comparable to OpenAI’s best but seemingly developed at a fraction of the cost. 

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 like X, including from its owner Elon Musk. 

Doubao 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.

The model’s pro version includes complex reasoning and multi-step task execution capabilities that match OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, while reducing usage costs by roughly an order of magnitude, according to the company.

“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. 

Doubao leads all AI chatbot apps in China with 155 million weekly active users, with DeepSeek second at 81.6 million, according to information provider QuestMobile’s most recent data, published in late December.

But Doubao 2.0’s release could help ByteDance fend off recent pressure from domestic competitors. 

Alibaba on February 6 announced it was spending 3 billion yuan ($400 million) on a coupon giveaway campaign to attract more users to its Qwen AI app, allowing them to use the incentives to purchase food and drink directly in the chatbot.

This led daily active users on Qwen to skyrocket from 7 million to 58 million, just 23 million shy of Doubao’s figures on the same day, according to QuestMobile.

(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Additional reporting by Kevin Yao; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)