ByteDance Reported to Secretly Create AI Products including Digital Human

BEIJING, March 7 (TMTPost)-- Recent news suggested ByteDance Ltd. is stepping up to catch up in the artificial intelligence (AI) race.

Credit：Visual China

ByteDance is secretly developing multiple products backed by AI large models, including the multi-modal digital human and the AI video generator, Chinese digital news media outlet Jiemian learned from several people familiar with the matter. One of the people, who saw the demo of ByteDance-developed multi-modal digital human in the second half of last year, commented the product looks pretty good.

CapCut, the all-in-one video editor and graphic design tool under ByteDance, has created a team to develop AI offerings couples of months ago, and the team is still at an ultra-secretive state as the products it is working on have not launched yet, according to Jiemian. A person close to ByteDance revealed the company is currently facing greater pressure in developing large models since it sway back and forth on whether to conduct research and development (R&D) from the scratch or invest in the existing model. ByteDance was said to initially seek investments in two AI model startups-- MiniMax and Jieyue Xingchen, but decided to drop the plan last June to turn into in-house models. The person said whethet the strategic decision to scrap any investment in AI companies is right warrants re-evaluation, particularly given Alibaba’s recent participation in a US$1.0 billion funding round of Moonshot AI, the largest single financing round for a Chinese AI startup.

However, people famliar with ByteDance’s large model initiatives stress that one cannot completely dismiss the company’s positioning in the AI large model at the moment. Among all the relevant product portfolio under ByteDance, CapCut appears to be the promising one to advance its AI large model implementations.

ByteDance didn’t comment on the report. Previous news have signaled its urgency to develop AI products. ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo earlier this year called for return to entrepreneurial spirit as ByteDance has fallen behind in the latest AI race ignited by OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT. “We are not sensitive enough to external changes,” Liang said the ByteDance annual all-hands meeting for 2024 on January 30. “During our semi-annual technical review, discussions related to GPT did not emerge until 2023, despite GPT-1 being released in 2018.” Liang urged employees to reinforce a sense of crisis as a goal of the coming year.

ByteDance founder and former CEO Zhang Yiming has devoted all his time to AI over the past year. Zhang’s allocation of energy for AI demonstrates the importance that ByteDance attaches to AI business, according to a Jiemian report last month. The report said that ByteDance is drawing top talent from the entire company to support its AI business. Zhu Jun, the former product manager at TikTok and current vice president of product and strategy at ByteDance, has been appointed as the product manager of Flow. Some core product personnel at TikTok were said to have been transferred to Flow.

To the date,ByteDance’s Flow department has rolled out three AI conversational products, including Dou Bao, Kou Zi, and Cici. Dou Bao is a chatbot product that can perform various tasks such as question answering, text generation, and language translation. It can also provide personalized services by adapting responses based on user needs and context. Kou Zi is an all-in-one AI Bot development platform that allows users to quickly build various types of question-answering bots based on AI models, regardless of their programming background, handling simple Q&A and complex dialogues.

Douyin CEO Kelly Zhang Nan said last month she has resigned as Douyin CEO and will be joining the team of CapCut to help grow it in the age of AI. Zhang's exit from Douyin was deemed as ByteDance's new focus on AI-generated video from text. Over the past year, Zhang has channeled the majority of her energy to CapCut-related business and personally led the team to seek breakthroughs in AI-assisted creation, a person close to CapCut revealed to TMTPost. The person added Zhang is about to launch a product that generates images and videos with AI.