Ten days after accessing DeepSeek, starting from February 22, Tencent’s AI application "Tencent Yuanbao" surpassed ByteDance's AI application bean bag and jumped to the free APP download of Apple App Store in China. It is ranked second in the list and has been maintained to this day.

Photo Note: Tencent Yuanbao downloads exceed Byte Beanbao Picture source: Alphabet List Screenshot

"I heard that product managers of Tencent's C-end business have to switch to AI products after returning to the beginning of the year The manager was, but I didn't expect that Tencent was moving so quickly. "Chen Ming (pseudonym), an employee of Byte's big model business group, told the letter list (ID: wujicaijing) that at the end of the holiday, I worked overtime to develop the inference model internally. No one expected that Tencent, which has always been Buddhist, would be so violent this time.

However, compared to the huge discussion caused by DeepSeek R1 in bytes, Tencent's T1 inference model seems to be "not enough to see". There was not too much Tencent in the chat in the tea room. They believed firmly, "If there would be a big reasoning model in China that catches up or even surpasses DeepSeek R1, it would be bytes."

And bytes' goal is to "transcend".

A relevant person revealed to the Alphabet that Byte's self-developed inference model is expected to be launched at the end of March. At the same time, last year, Doubao had washed away Douyin traffic and turned to a large number of Doubaos invested in channels such as B station, and decided to postpone the delivery.

In this regard, the alphabet list confirmed to the Bytes. Bytes did not specify the specific release time of the self-developed inference model, but pointed out that Doubao did not wash out the Douyin traffic. .

On the other hand, Tencent’s whole family buckets have been connected to DeepSeek one after another. WeChat, which has always been restrained, has frequently built momentum for Tencent Yuanbao. In WeChat Moments, Bilibili’s screen page, and even Tencent meeting’s main page have Yuanbao advertisements.

"The best DeepSeek experience under Tencent is in Tencent Yuanbao", and has thus become the new slogan of Tencent's big model C-end business. According to DataEye data, before February 15, the amount of materials placed by Doubao and Kimi exceeded Tencent Yuanbao by 2-3 times. Subsequently, between February 18 and 23, the amount of materials used by Yuanbao increased by 345.1% month-on-month. Tencent took over Byte and ran towards the next big technology company that would spend money.

Bytes were also gradually forced to the corner by Tencent, which accelerated to embrace DeepSeek. Before DeepSeek became popular, Doubao was a well-deserved star product in the past year, but now, Yuanbao, which has come from behind, is taking away some of the dazzling halos belonging to Doubao.

If the previous ranking was surpassed by DeepSeek, Bytes could still regard it as an emergency, now when Tencent takes advantage of the DeepSeek's east wind to catch up with Doubao again, the competitive narrative of the big model has officially been upgraded to the application competition among large technology manufacturers. Since the era of mobile Internet, Tencent and Byte, the two companies that also rely on products, have been confronting each other frequently at the application level.

You can imagine that the news that Tencent Yuanbao has surpassed Doubao will continue to amplify the vibration and impact of the internal vibration of bytes.

DeepSeek's rise is nothing more than waking Zhang Yiming and Byte from the dream of winning over Doubao in the past year. Now, Ma Huateng, supported by Liang Wenfeng, has completely forced Zhang Yiming to the corner, and Byte may have to take action.

Faced with Tencent Yuanbao's attack, the most direct and effective return to Bytes is to launch a new self-developed inference model as soon as possible.

"Tencent Yuanbao has iterated 5 versions in a week, from Buddhist follower to brisk pace. Tencent not only wants to take over the traffic spillover of WeChat AI search, but also bet on bytes that cannot produce new ones for a short time. The reasoning model. "A algorithm engineer from a leading Internet company told the alphabet list that Tencent undoubtedly seized the gap before the launch of Byte's self-developed inference model. At this time, spending money to push Yuanbao and pushing his own T1 reasoning model, which is the time difference.

From the results, Tencent’s time difference strategy has achieved certain results.

According to the data of Feifan Industry and Research, Tencent Yuanbao announced its access to DeepSeek on February 13. By February 21, the daily active users of the web end continued to rise. On February 21, the daily active users of the yenbao reached 500,000, only In less than 10 days, Tencent Yuanbao's daily active users reached nearly 1/2 of the average daily active users of Byte Beanbao. In the Apple free APP download ranking, it successfully surpassed Doubao and jumped to second place.

Photo Note: Doubao VS Tencent Yuanbao web terminal daily active-active trend chart source: Feifan Industry Research

The Tencent T1 reasoning model has been in the internal testing stage, and Tencent Yuanbao has been bound to DeepSeek While quickly attracting traffic, Baidu also announced that it will launch a new big model in the next 4-5 months, and Alibaba has officially announced that it will invest more than 380 billion yuan in the next three years to realize its AGI dream.

The technology giants have set up a new arms race, and now only Bytes have no new plans yet.

"Since the Spring Festival rework, I have been working overtime to develop my own inference model." Chen Ming said that the Byte office building located in Dazhong Temple in Beijing has concentrated Byte's Douyin business team and Volcano The engine business team, even after 10 pm on weekends, the entire building is still brightly lit.

As for the appearance of byte self-developed inference model, it is clear that the internal requirement is to align or even surpass DeepSeek R1.

Recently, the ByteDance Big Model Team also took action in time.

According to reports, Seed, the core department of Byte internal positioning, is rapidly adjusting its positioning, and has just introduced Google and participated in Gemini launch.The big bull Wu Yonghui was sent. Wu Yonghui will become the new technology director of Seed, while Zhu Wenjia, the former general manager of Seed, is in charge of the application side. In addition to adjusting business division, Byte also proposed a new sparse model architecture UltraMem.

According to public data, the latest architecture proposed by the Doubao team has an inference speed of 2-6 times higher than that of the MoE architecture, and the inference cost can be reduced by up to 83%. Faster and lower in price, Byte seems to be intentionally targeting DeepSeek's comfort zone.

However, although launching a new self-developed inference model as soon as possible like Musk is the best response strategy for Bytes, in addition to relying on technological innovation to attract traffic, Bytes has another way to catch up again The path to Yuanbao is to continue to invest money.

Previously, Doubao has been in the market for nearly half a year by relying on its monopoly on Douyin's investment advertising. Byte successfully made Doubao a domestic leading AI APP with a monthly active users of 70 million yuan through investments of no cost.

However, it is undoubtedly a question whether such high-intensity delivery can continue in 2025.

After all, although the delivery is effective quickly, it hurts money. According to AppGrowing data, in the second half of last year, Kimi, the most expensive investment, had a cumulative investment of more than 500 million yuan, and the amount of investment in October alone exceeded 200 million yuan. The one who chased the most was Doubao, which invested more than 400 million yuan during the same period. Even for Bytes with rich wealth, they have to face the dilemma of entering a growth bottleneck and increasing investment.

According to reports, the Dark Side of Investment Streaming has recently decided to significantly shrink Kimi's product launch budget. Whether to continue to invest money regardless of the cost, or to follow up on adjusting the delivery policy, Bytes, which urgently needs to fight back, has put a new multiple-choice question in front of them.

Compared with Tencent's glory after being blessed by DeepSeek, Byte's past achievements have now been transformed. In order to connect to the shackles on DeepSeek - the more you paid attention to Doubao before, it is difficult to connect to DeepSeek now.

When Tencent’s family buckets are connected to DeepSeek one after another, Byte seems to prefer services that are biased towards B-side to embrace DeepSeek.

Recently, Byte Volcano Engine announced the launch of the R1 API gift, that is, as a DeepSeek R1 model API provider, Byte encourages users to invite more friends to register and give a voucher of up to 145 yuan, which can be free. Deduct 36.25 million tokens.

But although Byte is willing to spend money on attracting new products on the B-end, for its own C-end products, whether it is Douyin or Doubao, there has been no news of access to DeepSeek.

Unlike Tencent, which was quite Buddhist in the research and development of AI models before, and had never even pushed C-end APPs in its own WeChat traffic pool, Byte All in AI's posture is quite radical. In other words, Bytes' burden is too heavy.

Previously, in order to seize the initiative in the big model pursuit battle, Byte poached people everywhere while spending money to promote bean bags.

Taking Wu Yonghui, who was recently exposed to joining Seed, the AI ​​department of Bytes, as an example, although the poaching chips have not been revealed, in terms of his position, "the annual salary is definitely over 10 million, and a large proportion of them will be It is presented in stock formation." said Xing Ze, founder of Jiaming, a headhunter company that serves major companies.

At the same time, in order to feed soybean bread, Byte almost made Douyin into the exclusive traffic field of bean bread.

On March 18 last year, TikTok announced a huge number of advertisements, restricting the investment of AIGC software. From April 2 to the end of the year, no one in non-byte products can use TikTok and Toutiao. Traffic pool. Since August last year, although the scale of bean bag delivery is smaller than that of Kimi, Zhipu, Hoshino and other products, the average monthly download volume is nearly 6 million times, and it has quickly become the top application for 70 million monthly active users.

In the e-commerce field, Douyin can still make money from its competitors while taking into account its own business. In order to get behind the scenes, Byte's huge amount has become the first platform to restrict the placement of other similar products.

With such a big investment, Byte's elephant became even more difficult.

When Baidu, which is also a major technology manufacturer and insists on self-development and rarely invests in other large-scale companies, began to connect to DeepSeek on the main C-end application, Byte insisted on not connecting to DeepSeek. The actions are ushering in more and more doubtful eyes from the outside world. At the same time, more pressure is also pouring towards Byte and Zhang Yiming.

However, it should be noted that this AGI war is still far from over, and it is difficult to decide the victory with a temporary lead, regardless of Tencent Whether bytes or bytes, each has its own opportunities and challenges.

Although Tencent has shown a catching-up momentum in the competition for C-end users by binding DeepSeek. But it should be noted that in the multimodal technical layout, Byte still has a certain leading advantage.

As Tencent's first AI product to connect to the DeepSeek R1 model, Yuanbao provides functions including AI search, intelligent document processing, AI music recommendation, AI map navigation and intelligent assistant.

But in comparison, Byte has been deeply engaged in the Wensheng video field for a year last year. It not only launched Jimeng AI and Kuaishou Keling, but also recently launched VideoWorld (open source video model). That is, there is no need to rely on any reinforcement learning search or reward function mechanism to perform tasks, such as reaching the Go level of 9x9 in professional 5th stages.

Not to mention, Byte has long established itself in the B-end market with its cutting and screening. For later DeepSeek and Tencent, Byte still has a time advantage.

At the same time, according to Bloomberg on February 21, considering the potential of Doubao, SoftBank Group's Vision Fund raised its valuation of Bytes to 4 in December 2024.More than $00 billion. From the valuation of US$300 billion last year to US$400 billion this year, despite the impact of newcomers such as DeepSeek, the outside world is obviously optimistic about Byte's profit margin in the AI ​​era.

For DeepSeek, to maintain the leading level of technology, it also needs to continue to maintain the iteration of technology. The difficulty of R&D will undoubtedly increase exponentially. Can the new model in the future continue to provide stunning beauty like R1? Experience, everything is full of unknowns.

For Tencent, which is designed to layout multimodal large models, if it wants to ultimately truly retain the overflow traffic of DeepSeek, it also needs to make its own R&D progress catch up with bytes as soon as possible, and in terms of model performance. Chase DeepSeek.

AI's war around cognitive revolution has no absolute winner yet, but it is destined to redefine the next decade of the technology giant. For 800 million daily active users of Douyin, what they are about to witness may be the most violent paradigm shift in history.