Doubao

Doubao (豆包, literally "bean bun") is China's most-used artificial intelligence chatbot, developed by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. Launched in August 2023, Doubao surpassed 100 million daily active users (DAU) in December 2025, and its DAU spiked to over 100 million in a single day again during the 2026 Lunar New Year period after ByteDance's Volcano Engine served as the exclusive AI cloud partner of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala.^[12][17][18] At the peak of that broadcast, Doubao processed 63.3 billion tokens in a single minute.^[18] The app is powered by ByteDance's proprietary Seed model family and is available on iOS, Android, web, and desktop platforms. Its international counterpart, originally released as Cici and later rebranded to Dola, serves users in select overseas markets.^[23][40]

Doubao offers a wide range of capabilities including text-based conversation, image generation (via the Seedream model), video generation (via the Seedance model), document analysis, voice interaction, and code generation.^[42] Through ByteDance's Volcengine cloud platform, the underlying Doubao models are also available as enterprise APIs, where aggressive pricing (as low as 99.3% below industry averages at launch) triggered a price war across China's AI sector in 2024.^[2]

What is Doubao used for?

Doubao functions as a free, general-purpose AI assistant for Chinese consumers and as a commercial Model-as-a-Service API for enterprises. Consumers use it for everyday question-and-answer, writing and brainstorming, document and chart analysis, real-time voice conversation, and creative image and video generation, all in a single app. Enterprises consume the same underlying Seed models through Volcengine to build their own products, with daily token consumption on the platform exceeding 50 trillion tokens by December 2025, a 417-fold increase since the model family launched in May 2024.^[10][50] Doubao was free for consumers in China until June 24, 2026, when ByteDance introduced paid professional plans alongside the free tier.^[47][48]

History

Origins and Early Development (2023)

ByteDance began internal testing of an AI chatbot in June 2023, initially under the codename "Yunque." The project was developed by ByteDance's Seed research team, which was established in early 2023 as the company's response to the rapid advancements in large language models following the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. ByteDance's earlier AI Lab, founded in 2016, was later fully merged into the Seed team to consolidate AI research efforts.

On August 17, 2023, the chatbot launched publicly under the name "Doubao" and was open to users in China without an invite code.^[1] The underlying language model was initially called Skylark (also referred to as the "Lark Model") before being rebranded under the Doubao name. At the same time, ByteDance released an international version of the chatbot called Cici, targeting overseas markets through a Singapore-based subsidiary, SPRING (SG) PTE. LTD.^[23]

Doubao was among the first AI models in China to receive algorithm registration from Chinese regulators, allowing it to operate as a consumer-facing product under the country's generative AI regulations.^[2][3] The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) approved the launch of Doubao alongside Baidu's Ernie Bot at the end of August 2023, shortly after the country's interim Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services took effect on August 15, 2023.

Rapid Growth and Price War (2024)

In May 2024, ByteDance formally launched the Doubao model family through its Volcengine cloud platform.^[3] The company set prices at 0.0008 yuan (roughly 0.011 US cents) per 1,000 tokens for its enterprise-tier model.^[3] According to Tan Dai, president of Volcengine, this was 99.3% less than the industry average of approximately 12 Chinese cents per 1,000 tokens for models of equivalent specification.^[2] The aggressive pricing strategy immediately triggered a broader price war across China's enterprise large language model sector, forcing competitors such as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent to slash their own API fees within days.^[2]

By May 2024, the Doubao app had passed 100 million downloads and had about 26 million monthly users.^[3] By November 2024, it had nearly 60 million monthly active users, which Volcano Engine said made it second only to ChatGPT among AI apps.^[55]

At the December 2024 Volcengine FORCE conference (Winter edition), ByteDance announced a comprehensive upgrade to the Doubao model family. Key releases included the Doubao General Model Pro (with 32% improved task-handling ability compared to May), a visual understanding model priced at just 0.003 yuan per 1,000 tokens (85% below the industry average), and a 3D generation model capable of producing high-fidelity 3D assets within one minute. ByteDance also announced that the Doubao video generation model would officially open for external services in January 2025.

Scaling to 100 Million DAU (2025)

The year 2025 saw Doubao's usage metrics accelerate dramatically. In January 2025, ByteDance released the Doubao-1.5-Pro model, a sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture with 20 billion activated parameters that matched the performance of a 140-billion-parameter dense model.^[4] The model came in two context-length configurations (32K and 256K tokens) and featured a "deep thinking" reasoning mode.^[4] Benchmarks put it on par with GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and ahead of DeepSeek-V3 and Llama 3.1 405B on tests including AIME.^[4]

In April 2025, ByteDance disclosed the technical details for Seed-Thinking-v1.5, a Mixture-of-Experts reasoning model with 20 billion activated parameters and 200 billion total parameters.^[5] The team described it succinctly in the technical report: "Seed1.5-Thinking is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with a relatively small size, featuring 20B activated and 200B total parameters."^[5] The model was trained with a custom reinforcement learning stack featuring two ByteDance-developed algorithms, VAPO (a value-based actor-critic method) and DAPO (a policy-gradient method), designed to stabilize long chain-of-thought training and reduce reward sparsity.^[5] Seed-Thinking-v1.5 reported 86.7 on AIME 2024, 55.0 on Codeforces, and 77.3 on GPQA, and "surpasses DeepSeek R1 by 8% in win rate on non-reasoning tasks, indicating its broader applicability."^[5] Volcano Engine launched the related Doubao 1.5 deep-thinking model at a FORCE LINK roadshow on April 17, 2025.^[53]

In May 2025, ByteDance published the Seed1.5-VL technical report and released the model on Volcengine.^[7] This vision-language model, composed of a 532-million-parameter vision encoder and an MoE LLM with 20 billion active parameters, achieved state-of-the-art performance on 38 out of 60 public benchmarks.^[7] In agent-centric tasks such as GUI control and gameplay, Seed1.5-VL outperformed leading multimodal systems including OpenAI CUA and Claude 3.7.^[7]

By August 2025, according to QuestMobile's AI Application Industry Monthly Report, Doubao reached 157 million monthly active users with a 6.6% month-over-month growth rate, officially surpassing DeepSeek to claim the top position among native AI applications in China.^[8] Over the same period DeepSeek's chatbot declined 4% to roughly 143 million MAU, and QuestMobile estimated that nearly 40% of users who left DeepSeek in May migrated to Doubao.^[8][49]

In October 2025, Volcengine launched Doubao 1.6-Vision, the first model in the family to use tool calling (such as cropping, scaling and annotating images) for visual reasoning, at about 50% lower cost than its predecessor, Doubao-1.5-Thinking-Vision-Pro.^[9]

In December 2025, at the Volcengine FORCE conference, ByteDance launched the Doubao Large Model 1.8 alongside the Seedance 1.5 Pro video generation model.^[10] The 1.8 model was optimized specifically for multimodal agent scenarios, with enhanced tool invocation, complex instruction compliance, and OS agent capabilities.^[11] ByteDance reported a score of 67.6 on the BrowseComp-en agent evaluation benchmark, ahead of Gemini 3 Pro.^[11] At this point, Doubao's daily average token consumption exceeded 50 trillion, representing a 417-fold increase since May 2024.^[10][50] More than 100 enterprise customers had each accumulated over one trillion tokens in usage.^[10]

In November 2025, Volcano Engine launched Doubao-Seed-Code, a coding model integrated with the Trae app that scored 78.8% on SWE-Bench Verified and whose coding plan was priced about 63% below the market average.^[54]

By late December 2025, Doubao had surpassed 100 million daily active users, according to people familiar with ByteDance's internal data, and QuestMobile counted 155 million weekly active users.^[12][16] ByteDance noted that Doubao's user acquisition and marketing spend was the lowest among all ByteDance products that had ever reached the 100 million DAU milestone, attributing much of the growth to organic distribution through its ecosystem of apps including Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) and Toutiao.^[12]

Doubao 2.0 and the Agent Era (2026)

On February 14, 2026, ByteDance released Doubao 2.0, powered by the new Seed 2.0 foundation model family.^[14] The release was positioned as an "agent-era" upgrade, shifting the product from question-and-answer interactions toward executing complex, multi-step real-world tasks autonomously.^[15]

The Seed 2.0 family includes four model variants: Seed 2.0 Pro for frontier reasoning and complex agents, Seed 2.0 Lite for general production workloads, Seed 2.0 Mini for high-throughput batch processing, and Seed 2.0 Code for software development (optimized for the TRAE IDE).^[19] The flagship Pro variant uses "System 2" thinking processes with advanced reasoning chains. ByteDance internally benchmarks Seed 2.0 Pro at parity with GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro on math, coding, and logical reasoning.^[14] Reported benchmark scores include 98.3 on AIME 2025, a 3020 Codeforces rating, 88.9 on GPQA Diamond, 87.8 on LiveCodeBench v6, 76.5 on SWE-Bench Verified, and 89.5 on VideoMME for hour-long video processing.^[19] The Pro variant also reportedly earned gold medal scores on the ICPC, IMO (35 of 42 points), and CMO programming and mathematics competitions.^[19] As of February 16, 2026, Seed 2.0 ranked sixth on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Text leaderboard and third on the Vision Arena leaderboard.^[19]

Pricing for Seed 2.0 Pro was set at approximately $0.47 per million input tokens and $2.37 per million output tokens, roughly 3.7 times cheaper on input and 5.9 times cheaper on output than GPT-5.2, and roughly 10 times cheaper than Claude Opus 4.5 (priced at $5.00 input / $25.00 output per million tokens).^[20]

Two days later, on February 16, 2026 (Lunar New Year's Eve), ByteDance's Volcano Engine served as the exclusive AI cloud partner of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, China's most-watched television broadcast, and the Doubao app was promoted heavily on screen.^[18] During the live event, Doubao handled over 1.9 billion AI-related queries, and at peak demand it processed 63.3 billion tokens in a single minute after a host invited viewers to join an interactive segment.^[18] Doubao users created more than 50 million themed avatars and sent over 100 million Lunar New Year greetings on the night.^[18] The partnership also included three rounds of lottery during the broadcast and over 100,000 technology product giveaways spanning robots, drones, 3D printers, and usage rights for Audi and Mercedes-Benz electric vehicles, with individual cash prizes reaching as high as 8,888 yuan.^[18] Doubao's gala campaign followed Tencent Yuanbao's 1 billion yuan coupon giveaway and Alibaba Qwen's 3 billion yuan promotion, in a holiday battle in which China's largest tech companies spent billions to acquire users.^[17] Doubao's DAU surged to over 100 million on that day, roughly four times its early-February levels.^[17]

Rankings have differed by tracker and methodology. In March 2025, Alibaba's revamped Quark assistant briefly overtook Doubao on Aicpb.com's ranking, with nearly 150 million monthly active users against almost 100 million for Doubao and around 77 million for DeepSeek.^[21] By the first quarter of 2026, QuestMobile ranked Doubao first by a wide margin, with 345 million monthly active users, up 44.2% from the previous quarter and more than 180 million ahead of second-placed Qwen.^[44]

Later estimates from QuestMobile, a Chinese mobile-internet data firm, put Doubao's monthly active users at 345 million in the first quarter of 2026 and 382 million in June 2026, and its weekly active users at 318 million in the week of June 22-28, 2026.^[44][45][46] On QuestMobile's January-February 2026 daily-user chart, Doubao peaked at 144.55 million in mid-February, around the Spring Festival Gala.^[46] Among the three apps QuestMobile tracks as typical AI advertisers (Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen and Tencent's Yuanbao), it estimated that Doubao accounted for 12.0% of their combined media (hard-ad) spending and 18.2% of their influencer (soft-ad) spending in June 2026, against 77.7% and 79.4% for Qwen.^[46] In August 2026, 77.2% of China's AI-native app users opened Doubao during the month (54.9% a year earlier), and 12.4% of Doubao's monthly active users made a payment inside the app.^[46] These are third-party modeled estimates; the Qwen app article compares them across the leading apps.

Underlying Technology

Seed Model Family

Doubao is powered by ByteDance's Seed model family, developed by the company's Seed research team. The model lineage has evolved through several generations:

The Seed 1.8 model introduced native foundational vision capabilities that allow it to directly interact with graphical interfaces across desktop, web, and mobile environments.^[11] It supports three thinking modes and integrates a video tool (VideoCut) for long-video reasoning, scoring 87.8 on VideoMME.^[11]

Architecture

The Doubao model family uses a sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, where only a subset of parameters are activated for each input. For example, Doubao-1.5-Pro activates 20 billion parameters per inference pass while maintaining performance comparable to a 140-billion-parameter dense model.^[4] This approach allows ByteDance to offer high-performance AI at significantly reduced computational cost, which directly enables its aggressive pricing strategy.

The Seed 2.0 generation employs what Creati.ai describes as "System 2" thinking, referring to multi-step deliberative reasoning processes (as opposed to fast, pattern-matching "System 1" responses).^[15] This architecture is designed for agentic workflows where the model must decompose complex objectives into executable sub-tasks and orchestrate multiple tools and API calls autonomously.^[15]

How does ByteDance train the Seed models?

A core differentiator of the Seed family is ByteDance's investment in reinforcement learning infrastructure. The Seed-Thinking-v1.5 paper details two in-house RL algorithms used during post-training: VAPO (Value-based Augmented Proximal Policy Optimization), an actor-critic method that stabilizes value estimates over long reasoning trajectories, and DAPO (Decoupled Clip and Dynamic Sampling Policy Optimization), a policy-gradient method that addresses reward sparsity in chain-of-thought training.^[5] The team also introduced new internal benchmarks and a blended reward system mixing verifiable outputs (for math and code) with non-verifiable outputs (for general tasks), reportedly contributing to the model's strong showing across both reasoning and conversational evaluations.^[5] ByteDance has reported speeding up its reinforcement learning cycle roughly threefold through a HybridFlow framework and a streaming deployment system.^[5]

Features and Capabilities

Doubao provides a broad set of AI-powered features across its consumer app and enterprise API offerings.

Feature Overview

Image Generation (Seedream)

Doubao's image generation is powered by the Seedream model family. Seedream 4.5, which Volcano Engine promoted at its December 2025 FORCE conference, generates images at up to 4K resolution and added multi-image combination and editing features.^[37][50] The model has been specifically tuned for "Chinese aesthetics," producing artwork that reflects traditional Chinese artistic styles.

In February 2026, ByteDance released Seedream 5.0 (along with the lighter Seedream 5.0 Lite).^[37] The 5.0 generation introduces chain-of-thought visual reasoning, which has the model plan composition, spatial layout, and physical accuracy before any pixels are rendered.^[37] It also adds real-time web search so the model can pull live information into a generation request.^[37] Seedream 5.0 Lite is positioned as a "unified multimodal image generation model" that combines deep thinking, online search, and generation in a single pipeline.^[38]

Video Generation (Seedance)

The Seedance model family handles video generation within Doubao. Seedance 1.0 was launched at the Volcengine FORCE conference on June 11, 2025, and ranked first on both the text-to-video and image-to-video leaderboards maintained by Artificial Analysis as of June 10, 2025, generating a 5-second 1080p clip in about 41.4 seconds and beating Veo 3 and Kling 2.0 by over 100 points on the image-to-video task.^[43] Seedance 2.0, released in February 2026, accepts four input modalities in one request: text, up to 9 images, up to 3 video clips, and up to 3 audio clips, and generates video with synchronized audio. Its successor, Seedance 2.5, released on July 31, 2026, extends single-pass generation to 30 seconds and is available in the Doubao Pro app.^[57]

Volcano Engine disclosed Seedance 2.0 pricing on March 4, 2026: pure text-to-video generation costs 46 yuan ($6.40) per million tokens, while video-to-video editing mode costs 28 yuan ($3.90) per million tokens.^[36] A 15-second clip consumes about 308,880 tokens, which works out to roughly 1 yuan ($0.14) per second of generated video.^[35] When the pricing was published, Seedance 2.0 did not yet support API calls and was limited to a free experience quota on Volcano Engine;^[36] Volcano Engine opened the Seedance 2.0 API by early April 2026.^[39]

Voice and Speech

Doubao supports voice-based interaction through both its mobile and desktop apps. Users can tap a microphone icon to speak instead of typing, and the app responds with synthesized speech. In December 2024, Volcengine announced plans for an end-to-end real-time voice model with capabilities including multi-character performance and dialect conversion.^[55]

The current generation uses a speech-to-speech architecture, allowing the assistant to respond faster than traditional speech-to-text-to-speech pipelines and letting the user interrupt the assistant mid-sentence.^[30] DataGlobeHub lists support for about 20 regional Chinese dialects, a differentiator for users who speak Cantonese, Sichuanese, Shanghainese, or other non-Mandarin varieties.^[40]

Document and Visual Analysis

Users can upload files (PDFs, images, spreadsheets) for analysis through the app's paperclip interface. Doubao can summarize long articles, extract key points from reports and meeting notes, interpret charts and graphs, and analyze video content. The Seed1.5-VL model provides the visual understanding backbone, excelling at complex reasoning, optical character recognition, image interpretation, and open-vocabulary detection.^[7]

OS Agent and Doubao Phone

In December 2025, ByteDance partnered with smartphone manufacturer ZTE to launch the Nubia M153, marketed as an "engineering prototype" for testing operating-system-level agentic AI.^[26] The device was announced in China on December 1, 2025, priced at 3,499 yuan (about $494), with a 6.78-inch screen and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor.^[26] It embeds Doubao directly at the operating-system level, where it runs as a system service rather than a normal app.^[26] The OS agent can read on-screen content, drive third-party app interfaces, and execute multi-step natural language requests entirely by voice.^[26] A ByteDance demo video showed the assistant identifying a product from a social media post, comparing prices across several e-commerce platforms, and placing an order on the cheapest one, with the user still completing payment.^[28]

The first production run of the Doubao Phone (about 30,000 units) sold out quickly, and resellers listed units for about 1,000 yuan above retail.^[28] ByteDance said it had no plans to make its own smartphones and was in talks with multiple phone makers about the assistant, and a public update log showed the handset receiving software releases about every two weeks.^[27][29][30]

Privacy, Security, and Censorship

Doubao operates under China's Interim Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services (effective August 2023), which require providers to register algorithms with the Cyberspace Administration of China, uphold "core socialist values," prevent generated content that undermines state authority or incites subversion, and label synthetic media.^[34] Independent testing has found Doubao behaves consistently with these rules: it deflects, sanitizes, or declines to engage with politically sensitive topics such as the events of June 4, 1989, criticism of senior Chinese leadership, and Taiwanese sovereignty.^[32] Taiwan's National Security Bureau, in a November 2025 review of Chinese AI models, reported that Doubao avoided politically charged terminology and exhibited bias on Taiwan-related queries.^[33]

The launch of the Doubao Phone in December 2025 brought a separate set of privacy concerns. Because the OS-level agent has system permissions that go beyond what a normal app receives, including the ability to open virtually any installed application without going through a public API, a senior security executive at a major app told Nikkei Asia that Doubao had been granted excessively broad permissions.^[28] Soon after launch, users reported that WeChat, Taobao, Alipay and several banking apps blocked or flagged the assistant, with some accounts frozen or logins refused; the companies attributed this to routine security controls.^[28][29] The same executive said Beijing would not allow sensitive financial information to be managed by a private tech giant such as ByteDance.^[28] ByteDance then restricted the assistant in banking, payment and some gaming scenarios, and the Doubao team said the assistant does not store on-screen content in the cloud or use it for model training.^[29][51]

Platform Availability

Doubao is available across multiple platforms:

• Mobile: iOS and Android apps with cloud synchronization
• Desktop: Native applications for Windows (10 and 11, including x86 and ARM) and macOS (10.15 Catalina and above, with native support for Intel and Apple Silicon M1/M2/M3 chips)
• Web: Fully functional browser-based version accessible through Chrome, Edge, and Safari at doubao.com
• Smartphone OS integration: Available as a system-level agent on the Nubia M153 Doubao Phone, with additional Chinese OEMs expected to follow

All platforms support account-based cloud synchronization, allowing users to access their conversations and settings across devices.

International Version (Cici / Dola)

The international version of Doubao was originally launched as Cici in August 2023, targeting users outside mainland China.^[23] Cici closely resembled Doubao in interface design, supported text and voice interaction, included image generation and analysis, and allowed users to interact with intelligent agents created by other users.^[23]

In late 2025, ByteDance rebranded Cici to Dola. Existing users could log into Dola with the same account, with all previous chats and settings preserved.^[24] The app is developed and distributed globally by SPRING (SG) PTE. LTD., a Singapore-based subsidiary of ByteDance.^[24]

Dola is available in select markets including the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Spain, France, Poland, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Argentina, but as of early 2026 was unavailable in the United States, Canada, and Australia.^[24][40] The app supports roughly 18 international languages.^[24][40] Some features available in the Chinese Doubao app, such as native audio-synced video generation, are blocked in the international version.^[24] ByteDance does, however, license both the Seedream and Seedance models to international platforms through the Volcengine API, allowing developers outside China to access these capabilities without downloading the consumer app. By the end of 2025, Dola reportedly surpassed 10 million daily active users worldwide.^[24][40]

Coze Bot Builder Platform

Alongside Doubao, ByteDance operates Coze, a low-code platform for building custom AI chatbots and agents. ByteDance launched the Chinese version of Coze, known domestically as Kouzi, in February 2024, and also operates an international version.^[52]

The platform provides a visual builder with drag-and-drop workflow design, plugin integrations (including Google Search, DALL-E 3, and CapCut), short-term and long-term memory systems, reusable UI cards, and deployment options to ecosystems such as Doubao, Feishu (ByteDance's enterprise collaboration tool), and Telegram.^[25] The domestic version runs on ByteDance's in-house Doubao models (with Doubao 1.5 Pro as the primary model), while the international version integrates external models such as GPT-4o and DALL-E.

On April 18, 2025, ByteDance began beta testing Coze Space, an agentic AI platform that combines workflow logic, collaborative planning, and access to proprietary data.^[25]

In 2025, ByteDance open-sourced the core platform as Coze Studio, enabling developers to self-host and customize the bot-building infrastructure.

Volcengine Cloud Integration

Doubao's models are commercially distributed through Volcengine (Volcano Engine), ByteDance's cloud computing and enterprise services platform. Volcengine offers the full Doubao model family through a Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) API, allowing enterprise customers to integrate Doubao's text, vision, code, and agent capabilities into their own products.

Enterprise Adoption

As of December 2025, daily token consumption of Doubao models exceeded 50 trillion tokens, more than ten times the level a year earlier and 417 times the level at launch in May 2024, when Volcano Engine reported about 120 billion tokens a day.^[2][10][50] Daily use reached 120 trillion tokens in March 2026^[39] and more than 180 trillion by June 2026, according to Volcano Engine.^[48] Over 100 enterprise customers had each accumulated more than one trillion tokens in total usage by year-end, a figure that grew to roughly 140 customers by March 2026, spanning industries including e-commerce, finance, entertainment, manufacturing, and education.^[39]

In December 2025, Volcengine launched the Doubao Assistant API, making the core agent capabilities of the Doubao app (dialogue, reasoning, and search) directly available for enterprise integration. Future releases are planned to include multimodal understanding, in-depth research, content creation, and video call capabilities through the API. In April 2026, Volcengine became an official sponsor of the open-source OpenClaw agent framework and said it would co-build a Chinese mirror of OpenClaw's ClawHub skill repository; it also promoted ArkClaw, its service for running OpenClaw with Doubao models, and opened the Seedance 2.0 API.^[39]

Pricing Strategy

ByteDance has consistently positioned Doubao as one of the most cost-effective AI model offerings globally:

This pricing strategy relies on the computational efficiency of the MoE architecture (activating only a fraction of total parameters per query) and ByteDance's massive infrastructure investments.

Monetization

Doubao's monetization model differs sharply from that of Western consumer AI products. Where OpenAI generates the bulk of its revenue from individual and enterprise ChatGPT subscriptions, Doubao was entirely free to use for consumers in China until June 2026, and ByteDance derives the majority of its AI revenue from Volcengine's Model-as-a-Service business. A March 2026 Ainvest analysis argued that Doubao's lead in users had not yet produced a clear, profitable consumer business model, and that education-related in-app purchases were the main source of consumer AI app revenue in China.^[41]

On June 24, 2026, ByteDance introduced paid subscriptions for Doubao, which AFP described as the first paid subscription service from a major Chinese AI chatbot; ByteDance said the professional version would offer higher usage quotas, and AFP reported that paid users could organize local files, build websites and generate slides in the app.^[47] According to Rui Caijing, the professional version runs on the Doubao 2.1 model series and has three plans at 68, 200 and 500 yuan a month, with annual billing of up to 5,088 yuan, while free users can also try an office-task mode on the Doubao 2.1 Turbo model.^[48]

Secondary monetization streams include in-app purchases for educational content (a category that, across Chinese AI apps, dominates direct consumer spend), licensing of the Seedream and Seedance models to international platforms via Volcengine, and indirect revenue from Doubao traffic that is funneled to other ByteDance properties such as Douyin and Toutiao.^[41]

Infrastructure Investment

ByteDance has committed substantial capital to AI infrastructure. Reports indicate the company planned approximately $20 billion in capital expenditure for 2025, with a significant portion directed toward AI infrastructure development. As of December 2025, ByteDance had preliminarily budgeted RMB 160 billion (approximately $23 billion) in capital expenditures for 2026, with more than half allocated to procuring advanced semiconductors for AI model development.^[22] The company has faced challenges related to U.S. export controls on advanced GPUs, and The Information reported in January 2025 that it planned to spend about $7 billion that year to rent NVIDIA GPUs in data centers outside mainland China as a workaround.^[58]

Competition in China's AI Market

Doubao operates in an intensely competitive Chinese AI chatbot market. Its primary competitors include:

According to QuestMobile, China's AI apps had 446 million users as of March 2026, and the combined (non-deduplicated) monthly active users of the top five AI apps rose from 355 million in the third quarter of 2025 to 722 million in the first quarter of 2026, driven largely by Spring Festival promotions.^[44]

Doubao's competitive advantages stem from ByteDance's distribution network (leveraging Douyin and Toutiao for organic user acquisition), aggressive pricing that undercuts competitors by an order of magnitude, and the breadth of its multimodal capabilities (text, image, video, voice, and code in a single app). The integration of Seedream for image generation and Seedance for video creation gives Doubao a content-creation edge that aligns with ByteDance's core competency in short-form video.

How does Doubao compare to Quark and DeepSeek?

The competitive rankings have been fluid. In March 2025, Alibaba's Quark briefly overtook Doubao on Aicpb.com's MAU ranking after Alibaba repositioned Quark from a cloud storage and search app into an "AI super assistant" powered by Qwen reasoning models; Aicpb counted app users and excluded direct visits to chatbot websites, which shows how methodology can swing rankings.^[21] Doubao regained the top spot from April 2025 and, on QuestMobile's figures, widened its lead: in the week of June 22-28, 2026, it had 318 million weekly active users against 83 million for Quark.^[40][46] Doubao's edge over DeepSeek widened through 2025: QuestMobile found Doubao reached 157 million MAU in August 2025 while DeepSeek slipped to roughly 143 million, with nearly 40% of departing DeepSeek users migrating to Doubao.^[8][49]

Key Milestones

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• ByteDance AIByteDance AI refers to the artificial intelligence research, products, and infrastructure developed by ByteDance, the Chinese technology company best known as the parent of TikTok.Mentioned 58 times above
• Volcano EngineVolcano Engine (Chinese: 火山引擎; pinyin: Huoshan Yinqing) is the enterprise cloud and artificial intelligence platform operated by ByteDance, the company that owns Douyin and TikTok.Mentioned 35 times above
• SeedanceSeedance is the family of foundation video generation models built by the Seed team at ByteDance, the Chinese internet company that owns TikTok and Douyin.Mentioned 23 times above
• DeepSeekDeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company based in Hangzhou. It was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who had previously co-founded the quantitative investment firm High-Flyer.Mentioned 13 times above
• SeedreamSeedream is a series of text-to-image and image-editing foundation models built by the Seed research team at ByteDance, the company behind TikTok and Douyin.Mentioned 12 times above
• ChatGPTChatGPT is a conversational artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and built on the company's GPT series of large language models.Mentioned 3 times above

More from See also

• Large Language Model
• Mixture of Experts (MoE)
• Multimodal Model

More to read

• ByteDance
• Chatbot
• TikTok

Topics:Chinese AIConversational AILarge Language Models

References

1. ^"TikTok Parent Company ByteDance Releases Generative AI Chatbot Dou Bao in China." Voicebot.ai, August 18, 2023. voicebot.ai/...erative-ai-chatbot-dou-bao-in-china
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