Haitong Securities: Doubao's leading advantage continues to expand, ByteDance becomes the flagbearer of AI commercialization in China

According to the Zhitong Finance APP, Haitong Securities released a research report stating that the leading advantage of the Doubao large model is expected to continue to expand in the future, and "stronger models" are also expected to be continuously realized. Looking ahead, ByteDance's AI goals of "stronger models," "lower prices," and "easier implementation" are driving ByteDance AI to rapidly penetrate various industries, and the eve of an explosion in AI applications is getting closer. Objectively, AI technology is gradually transitioning from a steep to a gentle curve, and the commercialization of AI has already become the next stage of AI development. ByteDance has become the de facto leader in AI commercialization in China, moving forward on the path of AI development.

The main points of Haitong Securities are as follows:

"Stronger models" are the continuous pursuit of the Doubao large model.

In 2023, the Doubao large model (originally named: Lark) was launched internally at ByteDance, and within a year, it was widely used across more than 50 businesses within the company. In May 2024, ByteDance officially released the Doubao large model family. In the following seven months, the Doubao large model team released several significant achievements, including Doubao-pro, Seed-TTS, Seed-ASR, Seed-Music, video generation models, and visual understanding models, continuously enhancing capabilities in language, multimodal understanding and generation, model inference, and code generation. By December 2024, the general model capabilities of the Doubao large model had fully aligned with GPT-4o, and in the FlagEval model evaluation's "dialogue model" ranking, the Doubao-pro 32k version ranked first.

In just six months, the Doubao large model has undergone continuous upgrades and iterations, with performance consistently improving, becoming an important cornerstone of ByteDance's AI development. This represents ByteDance's relentless investment in technology, which not only drives the continuous expansion of model capabilities but also effectively broadens the application boundaries of the Doubao large model. Additionally, the Doubao large model team's active research on cutting-edge AI technologies lays the foundation for the long-term development of the Doubao large model, and its leading advantage is expected to continue to expand, with "stronger models" likely to be continuously realized.

"Lower prices" and "easier implementation" allow the Doubao large model to penetrate various industries.

When the Doubao large model was first released in May 2024, the pricing for the main Doubao model in the enterprise market was only 0.0008 yuan per thousand tokens, allowing for the processing of over 1,500 Chinese characters for just 0.8 cents, which is 99.3% cheaper than the industry average. The pricing of large models has entered the "cent era." Subsequently, the Doubao large model family maintained an "extremely low" pricing system; for example, the newly released Doubao visual understanding model has an input price of 0.003 yuan per thousand tokens, which is 85% lower than the industry average, equivalent to processing 284 720P images for one yuan, marking the official entry of visual understanding models into the cent era.

In addition, Doubao is actively developing various developer tools to facilitate the implementation of AI applications. For instance, ByteDance has launched a new generation AI application development platform: Coze, which currently has over 1 million active developers, has released over 2 million intelligent agents, and provides a new AI application development environment with stronger multimodal capabilities This has enabled the Doubao large model to rapidly land in various industries. By December 2024, the daily token usage of the Doubao large model surpassed 4 trillion, with a growth rate of 33 times over 7 months. Especially in emerging industries such as automotive, mobile phones, and smart terminals, the usage of the Doubao large model increased by more than 50 times.

Looking ahead, Byte AI's goals of "stronger models," "lower prices," and "easier implementation" are driving Byte AI to accelerate its deployment across various industries, bringing us closer to the eve of an explosion in AI applications.

Not just Doubao, Byte AI's commercial layout is far-reaching.

In August 2023, the Doubao APP was officially launched. As time goes by, the application functions of the Doubao APP continue to deepen. By November 2024, according to the AI Product List · Application List (APP), Doubao's November MAU reached 59.98 million, significantly ahead of the second place, Wen Xiaoyan, with 12.99 million, placing it in a dominant position in the domestic market. Globally, Doubao's November MAU also ranks second among listed applications, second only to ChatGPT.

Doubao's functions are comprehensive, covering multiple platforms, with a low usage threshold, sufficient for daily scenarios. Coupled with Byte's strong advertising and traffic effects, Doubao has gained significant traffic. However, Doubao is far from being Byte's only layout in AI applications. According to Caijing magazine, Byte currently operates about 20 AI applications normally. In the list of the top 100 generative AI applications selected by a16z in August 2024, Byte had 6 applications listed.

Objectively, AI technology is gradually transitioning from a steep to a gentle curve, and the commercialization of AI has become the next stage of AI development. Doubao has provided Byte with unique successful landing experiences in AI applications, giving it an edge over competitors. Considering Byte's strong capital base and high emphasis on AI commercialization, the current 20+ AI applications may just be the beginning. Byte has effectively become the flagbearer of AI commercialization in China, moving forward on the path of AI development.

Risk Warning: The development of AI technology may fall short of expectations, the commercialization of AI may not meet expectations, and there is a risk of intensified market competition