The Chinese language web big ByteDance has made among the world’s hottest apps: TikTok and, in China, Douyin and Toutiao.
In america, TikTok claims 170 million customers. However in China, about 700 million use the home model, Douyin, and 300 million scroll the headlines on Toutiao, a information app. Each video that ByteDance’s customers watch or put up provides the corporate one other knowledge level about how individuals use the web. For years, ByteDance has utilized that wealth of data to make its apps extra interesting, enhancing its potential to advocate content material to maintain customers hooked.
ByteDance can be utilizing the info because the linchpin of a rising enterprise in synthetic intelligence. The corporate has invested billions of {dollars} within the infrastructure wanted to energy A.I. techniques, constructing huge knowledge facilities in China and Southeast Asia and shopping for up superior semiconductors. ByteDance can be on an A.I. hiring spree.
ByteDance is finest identified exterior China for TikTok, an app so widespread that no less than 20 governments have adopted partial bans over issues about its affect on nationwide safety and public opinion.
Concern over how ByteDance makes use of knowledge has pushed lawmakers in Washington to attempt to pressure a sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations. On Friday, President Trump prolonged a looming deadline by 75 days into mid-June.
However in China all that knowledge has helped ByteDance broaden its enterprise far past social media and acquire an edge within the international race to construct superior A.I. expertise.
“ByteDance has all this knowledge, on a regular basis, from tens of millions of customers,” stated Wei Solar, a principal analyst in synthetic intelligence at Counterpoint Analysis in Beijing.
Officers in Beijing have pushed China’s tech corporations to pivot from leisure apps to what the federal government sees as an existential objective: self-reliance in cutting-edge applied sciences that even have army purposes, like semiconductors, supercomputers and synthetic intelligence.
ByteDance has embraced that mission. Final yr, the corporate spent roughly $11 billion on infrastructure like knowledge facilities, networking tools and laptop chips, in line with a report by Zheshang Securities, a Chinese language monetary agency.
The Biden administration arrange guidelines to attempt to maintain Chinese language corporations from gaining access to these sorts of chips, significantly ones made by Nvidia, the Silicon Valley big. However ByteDance has discovered methods to get the computing energy it wants to coach its techniques — partly through the use of knowledge facilities exterior China and most definitely, analysts say, by shopping for chips made by Chinese language chipmakers like Huawei and Cambricon.
Whereas these Chinese language-made chips can not do every part the Nvidia chips can do, they work nicely sufficient to assist corporations like ByteDance present A.I. providers to individuals and companies in China. Chinese language tech corporations have been “inspired to undertake native choices” for purchasing chips, stated Lian Jye Su, an analyst at Omdia, a market analysis agency.
All this spending has helped ByteDance make some of the widespread synthetic intelligence apps in China. Its chatbot, Doubao, gained 60 million customers inside its first three months available on the market final yr. It was China’s hottest chatbot, beating rivals made by Baidu and Alibaba-backed Moonshot, till the start-up DeepSeek launched its personal this yr.
ByteDance confirmed how intently linked its app ecosystem is with its A.I. efforts when it not too long ago began permitting some customers to talk with Doubao contained in the Douyin app.
In 2021, ByteDance began Volcano Engine, a enterprise that lets different corporations pay to make use of the applied sciences that made TikTok, Douyin and Toutiao so addictive, like instruments to research info and the algorithms that advocate movies.
A few of these providers have been pure purposes of the expertise that ByteDance developed for Douyin and TikTok, like filters that may make individuals seem a lot older or superimpose sparkly hearts on their faces. ByteDance used its expertise making these filters to assist corporations like Haier and Hisense develop movement-tracking expertise for gesture-controlled dwelling home equipment like sensible televisions.
GAC Group, certainly one of China’s largest makers of electrical autos, is utilizing Volcano Engine to translate and handle knowledge for vehicles bought exterior China. And Mercedes-Benz stated final yr that it might use Volcano Engine in its in-car voice assistant and navigation system in China.
ByteDance didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Firm job postings present that ByteDance is hiring for tons of of A.I.-related roles. The corporate not too long ago directed its engineering workforce to give attention to a milestone that tech corporations like OpenAI, Google and DeepSeek are additionally chasing — making an A.I. system that’s as sensible as or smarter than people, also known as synthetic normal intelligence.
Whereas many Chinese language corporations have began A.I. tasks, a a lot smaller quantity have the assets to put money into the personnel and computing energy wanted to advance the expertise. Some specialists count on {that a} analysis workforce someplace on the earth will make this sort of system throughout the subsequent yr or two.
Claire Fu contributed analysis from Seoul.
