36Kr Going Global · Attention | With hardware rumors emerging one after another, how is ByteDance's AI landscape shaping up?

On August 19th, according to LatePost, ByteDance will launch an AI mobile phone by the end of this year or early next year. ZTE will act as the ODM manufacturer, and the phone is tentatively named "Doubao Phone". Initially, it will be mainly used for internal testing by ByteDance teams.

In response, Doubao stated that there are currently no plans to launch its own mobile phone products. It is continuously exploring opening up its AI capabilities to various hardware manufacturers, including those in the mobile phone industry, but this does not involve the R & D and launch of its own mobile phone products.

This is not the first time such news has spread. At the beginning of this year, some media reported that ByteDance would cooperate with Nubia to develop an AI mobile phone. ByteDance officially responded that the information was false and there were no such plans.

Meanwhile, there are also similar "rumors" in the chip field. On August 20th, another market rumor said that ByteDance is collaborating with Verisilicon to design an advanced AI computing power chip. ByteDance denied this again, stating that there is no cooperation on AI chips between ByteDance and Verisilicon. In 2023, there was also a rumor that ByteDance was cooperating with US-based Broadcom to develop an AI processor, which would be manufactured by TSMC, but this was later denied.

The rumors and denials reflect the market's high attention to ByteDance in the AI hardware field.

As of now, what has ByteDance laid out in the AI + hardware field?

ByteDance has ventured into hardware more than once.

In 2020, ByteDance launched the education brand Dali Education and released education hardware products such as the Dali Smart Learning Lamp. However, as industry regulations tightened, the education business line gradually shrank as a whole.

In 2021, ByteDance acquired Pico, which became an important starting point for its hardware layout. After the acquisition, Pico expanded its team, released the new product Pico 4, and built a content ecosystem, once leading the domestic VR market. However, the industry demand never boomed. Since 2023, Pico has also faced business contraction, staff cuts, and a decline in priority. It stated externally that it will "focus on the long - term exploration and breakthrough of hardware and core technologies."

With the new imagination of the software - hardware ecosystem brought by the AI wave, hardware is about to become the key contact point for AI experience. There have been more actions and rumors about ByteDance's AI + hardware.

In 2024, ByteDance acquired the headphone brand Oladance and has currently launched the AI intelligent agent headphone Ola Friend. According to The Information, ByteDance is also developing a lightweight mixed - reality (XR) glasses, which look like goggles and are comparable to Meta's similar products. According to LatePost, ByteDance's Ocean team in charge of AI hardware is exploring multiple AI devices and belongs to ByteDance's large AI product team Flow.

Based on the current information, ByteDance's layout in AI hardware already exists and is systematic. Whether it's mobile phones, headphones, or glasses, regardless of the final form, what's more important is to use hardware as a scenario carrier , to undertake its model, application, and content ecosystem, forming a closed - loop experience of software and hardware integration.

ByteDance has achieved a comprehensive layout in the upstream and downstream of AI, including models, platforms, applications, and cloud services, building a rich ecosystem from models to applications.

At the model layer, ByteDance's Seed recently open - sourced the multimodal intelligent agent framework M3 - Agent. Its core highlight lies in long - term memory + multimodal reasoning. According to the multimodal long - video question - answering benchmark M3 - Bench it launched, M3 - Agent outperforms multimodal models such as GPT - 4o, achieving an accuracy improvement in multiple tests.

Compiled and drawn by Orient Securities

At the application layer, not only have multiple products such as Doubao and Jimeng become popular in China; products such as the AI education application Gauth, the chat assistant Cici, and the intelligent agent development platform Coze have also grown rapidly overseas. According to official information at the beginning of this year, Gauth has provided educational resources for 300 million users globally.

ByteDance is good at large - scale product and content strategies, but currently, whether in its domestic ecosystem or global expansion path, the presence of hardware is quite "thin". However, with the evolution of AI, hardware is about to become the key interface to carry AI capabilities. Filling the hardware gap will undoubtedly help ByteDance build an AI closed - loop from the cloud to the terminal, not limited to the domestic market.

In the future, ByteDance also seems to be moving towards an ecosystem layout of "software - hardware integration", just like international manufacturers such as Apple and Meta. This is both a strategic choice and an inevitable result of competition.

Written by Shi Yi

Edited by Jason

Images from Unsplash

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