On 22nd January 2025, ByteDance launched Doubao-1.5-pro, an advanced AI model that seeks to outperform OpenAI’s reasoning models. Despite the challenges posed by U.S. export restrictions on advanced chips, ByteDance’s model aims to make its mark amidst the competition in the global AI race.
Doubao-1.5-pro claims to surpass OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a benchmark that evaluates the ability of AI models to understand and respond to complex instructions. The model has shown significant results in areas such as coding, reasoning, knowledge retention, and Chinese language processing.
Available in two configurations–32k and 256k–Doubao-1.5-pro offers aggressive pricing through ByteDance’s Volcano Engine Cloud platform. The model leverages a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, where a few active parameters are considered during model training. This allows Doubao-1.5-pro to deliver the performance of a dense model that is seven times its size.
Also Read: OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle to build multiple data centers for AI in the U.S.
The ByteDance team has utilized a heterogeneous system design to further enhance model speed and reduce computational requirements. These modifications have allowed Doubao-1.5-pro to optimize tasks like pre-fill decode and attention-FFN to achieve high throughput and low latency.
Doubao-1.5-pro is particularly adept at processing long-form text, making it ideal for several applications, including legal document analysis and academic research. With this model, ByteDance has followed the suit of other Chinese AI firms that have recently contributed to the AI ecosystem. DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Minimax, and iFlytek have all been praised for their competitive performance against other popular reasoning models. ByteDance’s entry into the market has increased the number of cost-effective, high-performance solutions for complex problem-solving applications.