When Sora's internal beta version appeared at the beginning of the year, the outside world was once worried that the popularity of video generation tools might kill the development space of video editing tools such as Cutting. Ten months later, it turns out that not only were the editors not killed by Sora, but they also gained more and more attention within the company.

Recently, 36Kr’s “Intelligent Emergence” broke the news that the project team of Jianying and Jimeng has surpassed Doubao and has become Byte’s highest priority project in the field of AI.

At almost the same time, the release of the official version of Sora provided a strong footnote to Byte's above-mentioned decision.

Ultraman and Zhang Yiming, leading their respective companies, converged under the methodological consensus of "big efforts can produce miracles": the model performance scaling rule (Scaling) that has been verified on ChatGPT Laws), after being transplanted to the video field by Ultraman, it was proved that his strategy of "powerful miracles" is still effective, that is, increasing the size of the model will continue to improve performance, and thus the birth of Sora; on Toutiao and Douyin The tried and tested methodology of "Strength can produce miracles" has now been brought to the field of AI by Zhang Yiming, giving Byte AI the current external performance of catching up from behind.

But it is still far from Byte winning this AI competition. Even if it is as strong as Sora, it still faces ROI problems. Compared with the 60-second video generation time of the beta version at the beginning of the year, the video generation time of Sora's official version has been reduced to 5-20 seconds, and the number of video generation is also limited.

In order to expand revenue as much as possible, on the occasion of the official release of Sora, Ultraman also brought a ChatGPT Pro version with a subscription fee of up to US$200, allowing users to use unlimited o1 models and advanced voices mode etc.

If you want to completely realize Sora's ideal state, that is, unlimited video generation quantity and video generation duration, in Ultraman's view, one of the prerequisites is to reserve sufficient computing resources. , just to reshape the global semiconductor industry requires raising US$7 trillion.

For Byte, which wants to pursue the video generation track with all its strength, the AI ​​​​large model competition may test Zhang Yiming's determination and perseverance in resource investment more than any competition in the past.

Zhang Nan, who transferred to film editing 10 months in advance, bet on the growth magic weapon of AI and temporarily stood out from the internal competition.

Previously, foreign media reported that Byte has begun to form multiple small AI product teams internally since last year, with each team consisting of 10 to 15 people to develop new applications and interact with each other. Competition to gain Byte’s resource support.

If the cut-out incorporating AI is also regarded as an AI product, then Zhang Nan undoubtedly has a numerical advantage in the Byte AI horse racing. In announcing his resignation as CEO of Douyin Group on February 7, Zhang Nan said that he would focus on the development of editing in the future. At that time, Jiemian News reported that in the past yearIn 2018, Zhang Nan has devoted most of his energy to editing-related businesses, and has personally led a team to seek breakthroughs in AI-assisted creation. He is about to launch an AI-generated photo and video product.

Three months later, Zhang Nan handed over his first job after transferring to another job - Jimeng AI that supports image and video generation. The latter became Zhang Nan's opportunity to create the next Douyin. .

According to the "Intelligent Emergence" report, Byte management judges that AI dialogue products such as Doubao may be just the "intermediate state" of AI products. A more ideal product form in the long term will most likely require more visual users. experience and lower user threshold. Jimeng, whose product priority has been promoted, has been internally assigned the important task of building "Douyin" in the AI ​​era.

The above-mentioned emphasis on dreams may have appeared earlier. In November, when Byte officially released the video generation models PixelDance and Seaweed, Jimeng won the first launch qualification and became the main entrance for the public to experience for free.

In addition to Zhang Nan once again having an opportunity to prove himself, more importantly, for Byte, whose current revenue growth rate is slowing down, AI is also expected to become its new growth engine in the future. .

According to "LatePost", in the first three quarters of this year, Byte's single-quarter advertising growth rate in China fell from about 40% to less than 17% year-on-year. In the past two quarters, it failed to achieve the set goals.

In November 2021, Liang Rubo, half a year after taking over as Byte CEO from Zhang Yiming, began to reorganize the organizational structure and establish six business sectors: Douyin, Volcano Engine, Dali Education, Feishu, and Zhaoxiguangnian and TikTok.

However, since November last year, except for the cloud services represented by the Volcano Engine, which has maintained stable business and team, the rest of Byte’s business sectors have encountered development obstacles one after another. In addition to vigorous education, day and night light years As a representative of the game business, Feishu has begun to streamline its organization, and TikTok is also facing the crisis of being banned in the United States.

Now, as the growth engine of Douyin has begun to lose power, how to find new fuel for the future sailing of the giant ship Byte has become a problem that has to be thought about in advance.

The wave of AI large models set off by OpenAI has become a good way for many Internet companies to seek new growth. Bytes are no exception.

Follow Scaling in Ultraman Laws rules, while using the strategy of working hard to achieve miracles, one after another improves the product layout of OpenAI, Byte, which is in the state of catching up, is also working hard to apply the methodology of working hard to achieve miracles to AI: on the basic model, it has successively launched Doubao Universal Models, bean bags·role play models, bean bags·voice Synthesis model, bean bag·sound reproduction model, bean bag·Vencent diagram model, bean bag·speech recognition model, bean bag·video generation model, etc.; in terms of products, Doubao, Cici, Coze, Xinghua, Cat Box, and Doubao Aixue have been laid out one after another. , Jimeng, etc., covering AI intelligent assistant, AI social networking, and AI toolsand mainstream application tracks such as AI education and AI video.

In the two years since the launch of ChatGPT to the official version of Sora, Byte has jumped from being a laggard in large-scale AI models to becoming one of the first-tier domestic players. Zhang Yiming has become the key player in promoting Byte’s qualitative change.

After the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, major domestic manufacturers such as Baidu and Alibaba successively launched self-developed large models Wen Xin Yi Yan and Tong Yi Qian Wen in March and April last year. However, it was not until August last year that the word Setcai unveiled the Skylark large model (the predecessor of the Beanbao large model). Starting from April 2023, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent will successively provide large model access services through their cloud services. It was not until May 2024, a year later, that the large bean bag model independently developed by Byte began to be officially provided to the outside world through the Volcano Engine.

The reality of slow progress in AI once led Liang Rubo to criticize in the new issue of All Hands (employee face-to-face) at the end of January: "The semi-annual technology review at the company level will not start considering GPT until 2023." , and the large model startups that are doing better in the industry were all founded from 2018 to 2021. "

The change will begin in 2023. In early May of that year, "Chinese Entrepreneur" magazine revealed that Zhang Yiming was busy studying a series of papers on OpenAI, and often read until late at night. "He wanted to understand what was happening on the other side of the Pacific," said a person close to him. .

In addition to studying papers, Zhang Yiming once again regained the state he was in when he founded Toutiao and began to transform into the company's number one HR. According to foreign media reports, Byte insiders said that although he has stepped down as the company's CEO, Zhang Yiming has been actively involved in the company's AI strategy and personally supervised the recruitment of Chinese AI engineers and researchers from rival companies.

As a result, Byte began to organize its internal and external arrangements around AI: Internally, in January 2023, it established its first large model team, and in December last year it established a new AI department, Flow, and hired Zhu Jun. and Zhu Wenjia are responsible for business promotion; in February, Zhang Nan transferred from Douyin to edit movies, which also demonstrated to some extent Byte's internal eagerness to speed up AI.

Externally, Byte is sparing no expense to recruit AI talents, and has successively recruited Jiang Lu, the former head of Google’s VideoPoet project, Huang Wenhao, the former head of pre-training at Zero One Thousand Things, and the former head of Alibaba’s Tongyi Large Model. Technical leader Zhou Chang.

Especially the recruitment of Zhou Chang. It is reported that ByteDance paid an 8-digit annual salary to win over Zhou Chang. Zhou Chang's job change also triggered a dispute between Byte and Alibaba. In early December, Jiemian News reported that Zhou Chang, a former employee of Tongyi, had been sued by Alibaba for compensation for jumping to Byte in violation of the non-competition agreement.

This has become an episode in Zhang Yiming’s vigorous development of AI. As Kunlun Wanwei founder Zhou Yahui said, “Byte’s AI strategy failed last year, but it did not affect this year’s full score performance at all... This is in line with my view onThe expectation of this organization’s ability to quickly iterate (the ability to roll dead people). ”

Compared with the mobile Internet era, in the AI ​​​​large model era, model training and inference costs constitute a growth trap that every player must face. The AI ​​competition field that is constantly being raised by OpenAI will also continue to This tests Zhang Yiming's determination to invest.

Whether it is technology iteration or the recruitment of top talents, real money is needed behind the scenes. Manufacturers in the field of large models must move towards commercialization as soon as possible.

In this money-burning game, those large model players will either be eliminated or absorbed by the big manufacturers. The case of smart selling to OPPO has become the latest footnote in this brutal competition. Earlier, star startups Inflection, Character.AI, and AI. The agent unicorn company Adept has faced the fate of being acquired by large companies in disguise.

The commercialization methods are limited, the training and inference of superimposed large models are expensive, and some of the leading domestic large model players cannot make ends meet. It was even reported that they were withdrawing from pre-training. Even if they did not want to give up pre-training, some large model players began to change their strategies and began to give up spending money on To in China. The C market strategy has shifted to fully develop the ToB field where it is easier to make money back.

The limited ceiling for commercialization has also become a major reason why Byte has shifted its internal focus from Doubao to Jianying and Jimeng.

According to QuestMobile data, as of October 2024, in terms of mobile AI native applications, Doubao, Kimi smart assistant, Wenxiao Yan’s monthly active users are 48.39 million, 16.5 million, and 11.79 million, respectively.

Even though Doubao ranks first among domestic AI products in terms of monthly active users, Doubao’s user duration is not optimistic. According to the reference data released, the average usage time of Doubao users per week is only about 10 minutes.

What’s more, in recent years, Byte has also bid farewell to its expansion and begun to continue to expand. Emphasis on "getting rid of fat and gaining weight"

After the success of Toutiao and Douyin, Byte's "big miracles" methodology hit the rocks for the first time in its education business. Liang Rubo, who succeeded Zhang Yiming as Byte's global CEO, has directly set the tone for the company by "reducing fat and gaining weight".

Since last year, Byte has been "vigorously expanding." The "miracle" methodology has frequently encountered obstacles, and two key businesses have been eliminated one after another: the game sector has laid off a large number of employees day and night, leaving only a small number of staff to operate online projects and explore innovative directions; the VR sector PICO has nearly 2,000 employees, more than half of whom have been transferred or laid off.

At present, the massive investment in large models has become a new test for Verification Byte’s miraculous methodology.