At ByteDance there is frenetic activity. At the moment, your social network TikTok is on a kind of legal limbo in the USbut ByteDance has many more open fronts. One is especially striking: AI. Especially because she had barely shown any signs of being involved in this segment.
A most “interstellar” AI agent. First of all, the launch of the UI-TARS project is surprising. The name is probably a nod to the movie ‘Interstellar’, which featured an AI robot called TARS. The proposal is very reminiscent of Anthropic’s ‘Computer Use’ system, but unlike it, UI-TARS is Open Source, something surprising and which suggests that other startups and independent developers can use it as a basis for their projects. The code is available on GitHub.
“Talking” to your computer. As in the case of Anthropic, it is possible to ask UI-TARS Desktop that executes tasks on your computer interface, which is capable of analyzing and recognizing to execute them. The developers warn that at the moment performance and behavior may be erratic.
Your own programming assistant. Bytedance recently launched a developer assistant. Is called Bring and offers the same advantages as already popular alternatives as Cursor. With this platform we have a “virtual software engineer” who answers questions about the code, completes and generates it, and is even capable of developing projects from scratch based on user prompts.
And a model that reasons…. The thing doesn’t end there, of course. ByteDance launched this week Doubao-1.5-proan update to its AI model that is now capable of “reasoning” and thus competing with OpenAI’s o1. In fact, those responsible for it claim that it surpasses its competitor in the AIME benchmark, in which the response of these models to complex instructions is measured.
And even though it is affordable, cheap and gives benefits. As they point out on PandaDailythe model is especially efficient and for example the price per million input tokens is only 11 cents. Not only that: even though it costs relatively little, it promises a gross margin of 50%, which in a reasoning model – which usually requires significantly more resources – is striking.
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Huge investment in chips. In 2025 ByteDance plans to spend $12.3 billion on infrastructure for the development of its AI models. This is indicated by sources close to the company, indicate in Financial Times. 5.5 billion will be dedicated to acquiring chips in China, while 6.8 billion dollars will be invested abroad to develop their models taking advantage of advanced NVIDIA chips.
Be careful with this other Bytedance. These are just the latest developments in the field of AI for ByteDance. This division continues to make losses – like most AI companies – because among other things it is reinvesting over and over again in R&D, and at this rate we may soon have to talk about another AI giant.
In Xataka | China strikes back in the AI war: its new open model matches Claude and GPT-4, and it is giving it away
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was originally published in
Xataka
by
Javier Pastor
.