ByteDance has rolled out Doubao 2.0, describing it as an upgrade to China’s most widely used artificial-intelligence app and positioning it for an “agent era” where AI systems take on more complex tasks. The company announced the release on Saturday as Chinese tech firms try to build attention around new AI models during the Lunar New Year holiday, which starts on Sunday.
Doubao 2.0’s “pro version” includes complex reasoning and multi-step task execution that ByteDance says matches OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, while cutting usage costs by roughly an order of magnitude. ByteDance framed that cost advantage as increasingly important because real-world, multi-step tasks can consume large amounts of tokens, the data units processed by AI models.
Built for the “agent era”
ByteDance said Doubao 2.0 is designed for a shift beyond simple question-answering toward AI models that can execute complex, real-world tasks. The company used the phrase “agent era” to describe this direction and tied the new release to that expectation of more capable, task-oriented systems.
The timing also reflects a competitive moment in China’s AI market, where several companies are seeking both domestic and overseas buzz during the Lunar New Year period. Reuters described Doubao 2.0’s launch as arriving ahead of a “highly anticipated” new DeepSeek model, with the release likely intended to avoid being surprised again during the holiday season.
Performance and cost claims
ByteDance said the Doubao 2.0 pro version can handle complex reasoning and multi-step tasks at a level comparable to top offerings from OpenAI and Google. The company also said the model reduces usage costs by about an order of magnitude, emphasizing that lower costs matter when tasks require “large-scale inference and multi-step generation.”
In a separate release earlier in the week, ByteDance launched a video-generation AI model called Seedance 2.0 on Thursday. Reuters reported that Seedance 2.0 went viral on Chinese social media and drew praise overseas on platforms such as X, including from X owner Elon Musk.
User race in China’s chatbot market
Doubao leads AI chatbot apps in China with 155 million weekly active users, according to QuestMobile data that Reuters said was published in late December. The same dataset placed DeepSeek second with 81.6 million weekly active users.
ByteDance’s release comes as competition heats up from domestic rivals, including Alibaba’s Qwen AI app. Reuters reported that Alibaba announced on February 6 it would spend 3 billion yuan (about $400 million) on a coupon giveaway campaign aimed at attracting users to Qwen, with incentives that could be used to purchase food and drinks directly inside the chatbot.
QuestMobile data cited by Reuters showed Qwen’s daily active users jumping from 7 million to 58 million after the campaign, leaving it 23 million short of Doubao’s figures on the same day. Reuters described Doubao 2.0’s debut as potentially helping ByteDance respond to that recent competitive pressure.
DeepSeek’s shadow over the holiday push
ByteDance, like Alibaba, was described as having been caught off guard by DeepSeek’s rapid rise to global attention during last year’s Spring Festival. Reuters said the surge drew notice in Silicon Valley and among investors, who were surprised that a Chinese firm had produced a model comparable to OpenAI’s best while appearing to have developed it at a fraction of the cost.
Against that backdrop, Reuters characterized Doubao 2.0’s release—arriving ahead of an expected DeepSeek update—as a move aimed at preventing a repeat of last year’s holiday-season surprise. ByteDance’s message around Doubao 2.0 also underscores a broader push toward more capable “agent” systems, paired with cost reductions that the company says could matter more as AI moves into longer, more complex workflows.
