A token of intent: Doubao’s data surge cements ByteDance’s AI ambitions

Chinese tech giant ByteDance has more than doubled the number of tokens processed by its flagship Doubao large language models (LLMs) in the past six months, highlighting a surge in artificial intelligence use among Chinese consumers and placing it among the top global hyperscalers.

Doubao’s average daily token usage jumped from 12.7 trillion tokens in March to over 30 trillion tokens in September, ByteDance’s Volcano Engine cloud unit president, Tan Dai, said at a corporate event on Thursday.

That represented a 253-fold increase from Doubao’s daily average in May 2024, equalling the daily average total for all of China in late June.

Tokens are the basic units of data processed by AI models – comparable to a pixel in an image, a snippet of sound, or a word in a sentence. For chatbots, a billion tokens equates to around a million conversations.

Tokens are also the standard billing units for using AI models through application programming interfaces (APIs).

The figures support an earlier statement by Alibaba Group Holding CEO Eddie Wu Yongming, who said overall token consumption in China was doubling every two or three months as AI adoption across industries grew faster than any previous technology in history. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

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