ByteDance has released a large model, "99.3% cheaper than the industry"
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ByteDance has released a large model, "99.3% cheaper than the industry"
Volcano Engine President Tan Dai believes that reducing costs is a key factor in accelerating large models into the "value creation phase."
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Li Xiaoyin
Source: Wall Street Insights
On May 15, at the 2024 Spring Volcano Engine Force Conference, ByteDance officially unveiled its self-developed large model, Doubao.
Image source: Securities Times
Volcano Engine is ByteDance's cloud service platform. According to Tan Dai, President of Volcano Engine, the Doubao large model includes the Doubao General Model Pro, Doubao General Model Liti, Doubao Role-Playing Model, Doubao Speech Synthesis Model, Doubao Voice Cloning Model, Doubao Speech Recognition Model, Doubao Text-to-Image Model, and Doubao Function Call Model.
Currently, the Doubao large model processes 120 billion tokens of text daily and generates 30 million images. After a year of iteration and market validation, the Doubao large model has become one of the most widely used and versatile large models in China.
At the launch event, ByteDance announced that based on the Doubao large model, it has developed the AI chat assistant "Doubao," the AI application development platform "Kouzi," the interactive entertainment app "Maobox," creative tools such as Xinghui and Jimeng, and integrated the large model into over 50 services including Douyin, Qimao Novels, Feishu, and Ocean Engine to enhance efficiency and optimize user experience.
Additionally, Volcano Engine has partnered with OPPO, vivo, Honor, Xiaomi, Samsung, and ASUS to form the Smart Device Large Model Alliance.
ByteDance stated that applications such as OPPO’s Xiao Bu Assistant, Honor’s Smart Office Assistant, Xiaomi’s “Xiao Ai Tongxue,” and ASUS’s BeanTalk AI assistant for laptops have already integrated Volcano Engine’s large model services.
Large Models Spark Price Wars
While enhancing performance, AI large models are also aggressively cutting prices, with free access for consumers (C-end) and price reductions for businesses (B-end) becoming a growing trend.
Currently, the pricing of the Doubao large model is significantly lower than industry standards. The flagship model is priced at only 0.0008 yuan per thousand tokens—meaning just 0.8 fen can process more than 1,500 Chinese characters—99.3% cheaper than the industry average.
For comparison, similar models on the market typically cost 0.12 yuan per thousand tokens—150 times the price of Doubao.
Tan Dai said:
“High usage volume enables better model refinement and dramatically reduces unit inference costs.”
“The shift from pricing by fen to pricing by li will help enterprises accelerate business innovation at even lower costs.”
Based on Volcano Engine’s pricing, one yuan can buy 1.25 million tokens from the Doubao flagship model—approximately 2 million Chinese characters, equivalent to three copies of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Previously, other large models such as ChatGPT and Qwen also rolled out significant price cuts:
On May 6, DeepSeek (Deep Exploration), a subsidiary of hedge fund幻方 Quantitative, launched its second-generation MoE model DeepSeek-V2, claiming performance comparable to GPT-4 at just 1% of the cost.
On May 9, Alibaba Cloud officially released Qwen 2.5, announcing that individual users could use Qwen for free via its app, website, and mini-programs.
On May 13, OpenAI launched GPT-4o, making it available to all ChatGPT users—both paid and free—and eliminated previous restrictions while reducing API prices by 50%.
Tan Dai believes that cost reduction is a key factor in accelerating large models into the “value creation phase.” Lowering prices shouldn’t be limited to lightweight versions; flagship and state-of-the-art models must also become affordable to truly meet the complex needs of enterprise scenarios, fully validate the practical value of large models, and catalyze innovations beyond existing products and organizational models.
ByteDance emphasized that Doubao is a major strategic investment. Currently, the Doubao app ranks first in download numbers among AIGC applications on Apple’s App Store and major Android app markets. According to Zhu Jun, ByteDance’s Vice President of Products and Strategy, over 8 million intelligent agents have been created on Doubao, with monthly active users reaching 26 million.
According to QuestMobile data, as of March 2024, Doubao had 23.282 million monthly active users, ranking first among AIGC apps.
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