TikTok parent ByteDance has launched an updated version of Doubao, China’s most popular consumer-facing artificial intelligence (AI) app, as the tech giant accelerates AI development despite US export restrictions on advanced chips.
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The Beijing-based company introduced its closed-source multimodal model Doubao 1.5 Pro on Wednesday, emphasising a “resource-efficient” training approach that it said does not sacrifice performance.
“The model adopted an integrated train-inference design from the pre-training phase to balance between the best performance and most optimal inferencing cost,” ByteDance said in a statement, adding that it has designed a server cluster with flexible support for low-end chips to bring down the AI training costs.
China’s Big Tech firms are striving to catch up with their US counterparts while facing budget constraints and limited access to advanced chips. This has pushed them to innovate in AI model efficiency, refining their products within the country’s closed market.
Benchmark tests have shown that Doubao 1.5 Pro excels in half of 14 evaluations that assessed the model’s language understanding, maths and coding skills, domain knowledge, visual understanding and reasoning abilities.
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