ByteDance internally judges that the ceiling of AI conversation-based products may not be high, and prioritizes the improvement of Jianying (Viamaker) namely Dream. | Exclusive from 36Kr.
Written by Deng Yongyi
Edited by Yang Xuan
Although the user scale of Doubao has increased in the past few months, like all AI conversation form products in the industry, it is still not ideal in terms of usage duration, opening frequency, and commercialization potential.
"Intelligent Emergence" has learned from informed sources that ByteDance's management judges that AI conversation (or chatbot) products may only be an "intermediate state" of AI products. In the long term, a more ideal product form is likely to require a more visual user experience and a lower user usage threshold. Therefore, ByteDance has raised the product priority of Jimeng and is trying to create the "TikTok" of the AI era through a new path.
"Intelligent Emergence" has sought verification from ByteDance on this matter, but ByteDance has not responded yet.
ByteDance Reflects on the Ceiling of AI Conversation Products
An informed source told "Intelligent Emergence" that the current user activity of Doubao is not very high. It is only active for 2 to 3 days per week, and the number of message rounds sent by users per day is only 5 to 6 times, with each round lasting about 2 minutes, and the average user usage duration is only about 10 minutes. The growth rate of these data in the past year is not significant.
Some management within ByteDance has proposed that this may not be the problem of Doubao. The relevant data of Doubao is already in the first echelon of domestic products. Similar text-based conversation products like ChatGPT are probably not the most ideal product form.
According to the third-party monitoring data of QuestMobile, in the past year, the average daily usage frequency of products such as Doubao, Kimi, and Wen Xiaoyan has been hovering between 4 and 5 times, and the average usage duration is basically between 5 and 10 minutes, with no obvious change.
In fact, in the past year, the performance of ByteDance's Doubao has been remarkable. In terms of user growth, at the beginning of the year, Doubao was still close to Kimi and Baidu's Wenxin Yiyan. But according to LatePost, the daily active users of ByteDance's Doubao App reached 7.6 million in September this year, while the daily active users of Kimi Intelligent Assistant were around 1.3 million in the same period.
In addition, in terms of product functions, Doubao has also quickly completed functions such as music generation, image-to-image generation, image-to-video generation, and visual recognition. Its voice function is particularly outstanding, achieving an all-round and all-in-one performance.
However, at present, key indicators such as the number of conversation rounds and duration are still not ideal. While the scale is increasing and the reasoning cost is rising, AI conversation products have not shown a feasible commercialization prospect.
An informed source revealed that ByteDance internally judges that the paid subscription model is unlikely to work in China. And the low duration and number of rounds result in a smaller potential advertising space, which constitutes an invisible ceiling for such products.
The Priority of Jianying and Jimeng is Raised
An informed source told "Intelligent Emergence" that some people in ByteDance's management have proposed that in the long term, it is necessary to find a product form with a lower threshold and more "multimodal" features, and Jianying and Jimeng may be suitable entry points.
As a video creation tool, Jianying has actually implemented a large number of the latest model technologies in functions such as image and video editing. Some of ByteDance's recent technical breakthroughs in the fields of image generation, video generation, and understanding, including the launch of the highly consistent image-to-video model PixelDance, and the first to achieve the ability to accurately generate Chinese on images. These capabilities are first applied in Jianying and Jimeng.
If Jianying is regarded as an AI product, according to the global AI product monthly active user list in October 2024 released by the research center of Extraordinary Capital, the monthly active users of Jianying are as high as 170 million, second only to ChatGPT's 250 million, ranking second in the world.
Jimeng is an AI creation tool and community launched by Zhang Nan, the former CEO of Douyin Group, after she joined Jianying. She previously expressed her optimism about the AI prospects in an internal letter and therefore decided to start an internal entrepreneurship again to create a new AI tool.
In addition to the AI tool attribute, Jimeng also has a strong content community attribute and has obtained a considerable number of AI creators through Jianying. Many AI designers will publish their AI works on the Jimeng platform. With the improvement of the creative effect of AI tools in the future, it is expected to see more ordinary users create high-value AI content. At the same time, the corresponding world model of Jimeng is a large application that may be oriented towards games, videos, and Metaworld, and many AI functions on Jianying have already shown some income trends.
ByteDance plans to transfer more resources to more multimodal product forms in the future, and Jimeng will bear greater hopes. For example, ByteDance's large model related to visual generation is being optimized around the needs of Jimeng and is first launched on Jimeng, such as generating Chinese characters and text-to-video. Most of Zhang Nan's energy is also invested in Jimeng.
In addition, ByteDance is also exploring some other multimodal and low-interaction-threshold attempts. For example, ByteDance's AI interactive entertainment product "Cat Box". "Intelligent Emergence" has learned that the average number of conversation rounds of its users is nearly 50 times that of Doubao.
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