BEIJING, December 8 (TMTPost)—ByteDance Ltd. Is stepping up efforts on artificial intelligence (AI) with a rival to OpenAI’s latest offering last month--a custom version of the popular chatbot ChatGPT.

Credit：Visual China

ByteDance is planning to launch a platform to allow users to create their own AI chatbots and the project, dubbed as “bot development platfom”, will roll out a public beta by the end of this month, the South China Morning Post cited the company’s memo. The platform was said to enable ByteDance to “explore new generative AI products and how they can integrate with the existing ones”. The Chinese internet giant was also said to working on an image-generating tool similar to Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

News about ByteDance’s mysterious AI chatbot began to swirl two months ago. Tech Planet learned in the beginning of June that ByteDance’s conversational AI project is conducting internal test, and the project has a code name Grace. Bloomberg that month reported a ByteDance spokesperson confirmed the project but didn’t reveal more details. The report quoted an anonymous tester that a pop-up message to greet any employees as testers said Grace is based on several large language models (LLMs).

Other ByteDance’s businesses were reported to make their efforts in AI. TikTok was said in May to test out a chatbot called Tako, which can answer questions and talk to users of the popular short-video app. Volcengine, a subsidiary of ByteDance, has launched an enterprise-focused big model service platform called Volcano in late June.

Unlike other Chinese tech giants including Alibaba and Tencent, which applied their self-researched big models directly on cloud services, ByteDance is still in the early stage of big models. Volcano Ark is a big model service platform that offers businesses Model-as-a-Service solutions (MaaS). It provides services by integrating big models from other companies. The companies that provide big models for Volcano Ark include seven AI companies and research institutes, such as Baichuan Intelligence, MOSS of Fudan University, International Digital Economy Academy, Langboat, and MiniMax.

ByteDance was reported in August that it has launched the public beta of its first conversational AI-powered bot, called Grace, and only users who have received invitation or have authorized accounts can log in the test website. Users can input any questions in the chat box and comment all the answers the bot gives with likes, dislikes, or ask the bot to regenerate its response, which are supposed to help improve its response, Chinese news media outlet Tech Planet reported. “It is not a mature product yet, and is still at the stage of internal testing” person in charge of the chatbot project of ByteDance later told Tech Planet. “There is still a big gap between the product and the leading-model-backed (rivals) overseas.”

August also saw ByteDance’s first AI conversational app Doubao started public test. Doubao is one of first batch of LLM-empowered services that were obtained regulatory approval for public use in China. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) approved a group of LLMs developed by a total of 11 Chinese companies or institutions including Baidu, SenseTime, ByteDance late August, a month after the authority introduced the Interim Measures to Regulate Generative AI Services, the first of rules on AI-based generative contents and services in China since the launch of ChatGPT.

ByteDance has set up a new AI division called Flow, whose business leader is Zhu Wenjia, the company’s LLM head as well as the leader of TikTok product research and development,  Chinese news media outlet 36Kr learned late November. Flow have launched Doubao and another bot Cici, targeting the domestic and overseas market, respectively, and it is incubating several other consumer-facing AI products, according to the report. The establishment of Flow is part of a series of restructure carried out in November. In addition to recruitments, Flow is also hiring candidates from other business groups such as TikTok’s Chinese version Douyin and  Feishu, the online collaboration tool, to develop large model-backed consumer products.