TikTok owner ByteDance on Wednesday released an update to its flagship AI model aimed at challenging Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s latest reasoning model products, as a global race intensified to create AI models capable of tackling complex problems.
The company released Doubao-1.5-pro, an upgrade to its flagship AI model, which it claims outperforms OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions.
ByteDance’s release comes after Chinese AI startup DeepSeek rolled out an open-source reasoning model called DeepSeek-R1 on Monday that it said rivaled OpenAI’s o1 on several performance benchmarks.
DeepSeek drew widespread attention in global AI circles last month after tests showed its V3 large language model outperformed those of OpenAI and Meta, despite a smaller development budget and plans to charge users a lot less.
The developments in AI reasoning by ByteDance, DeepSeek and others is likely to challenge the market share of OpenAI and other large language models in terms of both performance metrics and fees charged to users.
Other Chinese firms that have unveiled their own reasoning models in the past weeks include Moonshot AI, Minimax and iFlyTek.
OpenAI triggered the race in AI development after it launched ChatGPT in November 2022 and its “Strawberry” series of AI reasoning models in September last year. The latter are capable of reasoning through complex tasks and solving more challenging problems than previous models in science, coding and math.
