Organisation
ByteDance
The Doubao assistant and the Seed research group's model family, from the company behind TikTok and Douyin.
ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok and Douyin, is one of China's largest developers of consumer AI through its Doubao assistant and its Seed research group. Doubao launched in 2023 and, on the strength of ByteDance's vast consumer reach, grew into the most-used AI assistant in China, reported at around 155 million weekly active users by late 2025. Its Seed team develops the underlying Doubao model family alongside video-generation systems such as Seedance, competing with tiered model line-ups aimed at enterprise and developer adoption as much as benchmark leadership. By 2026 it was releasing frontier-scale models on a regular cadence, part of the crowded contest among China's largest internet firms — not only its dedicated AI labs — to lead the domestic market.
- Category
- Chinese AI labs
- Founded
- 2012
- HQ
- Beijing, CN
- Key people
- Liang Rubo, Zhang Yiming
Appears alongside
Tracks
- Models & capabilities 9
- Open weights & ecosystem 2
- Government & policy 1
- Culture & impact 1
- Benchmarks & progress 1
- Compute & infrastructure 1
China's AI companion law takes effect, forcing Doubao and Qwen to shut agent features
Rather than add the anti-addiction and instant-exit features the rules required, ByteDance and Alibaba simply switched off their personalised AI-agent tools instead.
Government & policy · Culture & impact
ByteDance unveils Seedance 2.5, generating native 30-second video clips
The model generates single clips up to 30 seconds long, including scene and tempo changes, without stitching together separate shots as earlier video models required.
Models & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress
ByteDance releases Seed 2.1 model family
The closed-weight Pro and Turbo models target multi-step agent tasks such as mobile-app control and coding, sold through Volcano Engine at prices quoted in yuan.
Models & capabilities
ByteDance unveils Doubao-Seed-2.0 model family
ByteDance's Doubao app led China's AI assistants with a reported 155 million weekly active users in December 2025, ahead of Alibaba's and Tencent's rivals.
Models & capabilities
Zhipu (Z.ai) releases GLM-5, trained entirely on Huawei Ascend chips
Released under the MIT licence, the 744-billion-parameter model scored 77.8% on SWE-bench Verified, days ahead of new Alibaba and ByteDance model launches.
Models & capabilities · Open weights & ecosystem · Compute & infrastructure
ByteDance launches Seedance 1.5 Pro with joint audio-video generation
The model generates video and audio through a single diffusion transformer rather than a separate pass, aiming for accurate lip-sync across eight languages.
Models & capabilities
ByteDance open-sources Seed-OSS-36B
Trained on 12 trillion tokens with a native 512K-token context and a user-adjustable 'thinking budget,' released under Apache 2.0 while ByteDance's flagship model stayed closed.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
ByteDance launches Seedance 1.0 video generation model
ByteDance said the text- and image-to-video model topped Artificial Analysis's leaderboards and generated a five-second 1080p clip in about 41 seconds.
Models & capabilities
ByteDance releases Doubao 1.6 model
Launched at Volcano Engine's FORCE conference in Beijing alongside the Seedance 1.0 pro video model, with three variants trading off reasoning depth for cost.
Models & capabilities
ByteDance launches Doubao chatbot in invitation-only testing
The invitation-only launch, running on ByteDance's own Volcano Engine infrastructure, was the company's entry into China's crowded post-ChatGPT chatbot market.
Models & capabilities
Also mentioned in 2 entries
Referenced in passing — ByteDance isn't the main subject of these.