Chinese technology company ByteDance has just officially launched the Doubao 2.0 artificial intelligence model, an upgraded version of the most popular chatbot application in this country. The move took place right before the Lunar New Year holiday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese people move back to their hometowns, which is also the period when technology companies often launch new products to create a large media effect.
According to data from QuestMobile, Doubao currently leads the AI chatbot market in China with 155 million active users weekly, far ahead of rival DeepSeek in second place with 81.6 million users.
However, increasing competition forces ByteDance to accelerate technological innovation to maintain its advantage.
Last year, the global AI industry was surprised by the rise of DeepSeek when this company announced a model with performance equivalent to OpenAI's advanced systems but said to be developed at significantly lower costs.
That success forced Chinese technology companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, to quickly adjust their strategies.
The launch of Doubao 2.0 before DeepSeek is expected to announce the new model is seen as an effort to avoid repeating the scenario of being surpassed by competitors in terms of media and technology.
Previously, ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 video creation model also attracted strong attention on Chinese social networks and received praise from the international technology community, including billionaire Elon Musk.
According to ByteDance, Doubao 2.0 is designed for the "ERA of AI agents", a period in which artificial intelligence not only answers questions but can also perform complex tasks in the real world.
The professional version of the model has advanced inference and multi-step task processing capabilities, which the company claims to achieve performance equivalent to OpenAI's GPT-5.2 and Google's Gemini 3 Pro, while the usage cost is reduced by about one level.
ByteDance emphasizes that the cost advantage will be particularly important when AI is applied to large-scale tasks that require processing a lot of data (token).
This is also the common direction of the industry when businesses seek to commercialize AI in production, services and operation.
However, domestic competitive pressure is still very high. At the beginning of February, Alibaba announced a 3 billion yuan campaign to attract users to the Qwen AI chatbot, allowing users to exchange discount coupons to buy food and drinks directly in the application.
This strategy helps Qwen's daily active user base increase from 7 million to 58 million in a short time, significantly narrowing the gap with Doubao.
The launch of Doubao 2.0 shows that the AI race in China is entering a new phase, where not only performance but also cost and service ecosystem will determine who leads.
With the current user advantage, ByteDance is betting heavily on the ability to maintain its position against the increasingly fierce wave of competition.
