On February 14, China’s ByteDance announced the release of its Doubao 2.0 model, an update to the nation’s most popular AI software.
During the Chinese New Year vacation, which begins on February 15 and involves hundreds of millions of Chinese enjoying family get-togethers in their hometowns, ByteDance is one of numerous Chinese companies seeking to create both domestic and international awareness about its new AI models.
Like rival Alibaba, the company was taken aback by DeepSeek’s explosive ascent to international prominence during the 2025 Spring Festival, when Silicon Valley and investors from all over the world were astounded by how a Chinese company had produced a model that was on par with OpenAI’s best but appeared to have been created at a fraction of the price.
The goal of Doubao 2.0’s release, which comes before the much awaited new DeepSeek model, is probably to stop this kind of situation from happening again.
After going viral on Chinese social media and receiving accolades from its owner, Elon Musk, on platforms like X, a video-generation AI model called Seedance 2.0, which ByteDance published on February 12, has already been compared to DeepSeek’s success in 2025.
According to a statement from ByteDance, Doubao 2.0 is set up for the “agent era,” where AI models are supposed to perform intricate real-world activities rather than just respond to inquiries.
The company claims that its pro version of the model lowers use costs by almost an order of magnitude while offering sophisticated reasoning and multi-step job execution capabilities comparable to OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro.
In reference to the unit of data handled by an AI model, ByteDance stated, “This cost advantage will become much more essential as real-world, sophisticated activities include large-scale inference and multi-step production that will consume a huge amount of tokens.”
According to the most recent data released in late December by information source QuestMobile, Doubao has 155 million weekly active users, more than any other AI chatbot app in China. DeepSeek comes in second with 81.6 million.
However, the launching of Doubao 2.0 may enable ByteDance to withstand recent pressure from domestic rivals. On February 6, Alibaba revealed that it would be investing 3 billion yuan (S$551 million) in a coupon giveaway campaign to draw more users to its Qwen AI app. The users would be able to use the incentives to buy food and beverages straight from the chatbot.
According to QuestMobile, this caused the number of daily active users on Qwen to soar from 7 million to 58 million, falling only 23 million short of Doubao’s numbers that same day.
