BEIJING, August 7 (TMTPost)— TikTok parent ByteDance is jumping on the artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) bandwagon with its own ChatGPT.

Credit：Visual China

ByteDance has launched the public beta of its first conversational artificial intelligence (AI)-powered bot, called Grace, and only users who have received invitation or have authorized accounts can log in the test website, Chinese news media outlet Tech Planet reported.  “It is not a mature product yet, and is still at the stage of internal testing,” person in charge of the chatbot project of ByteDance later told Tech Planet. “There is still a big gap between the product and the leading-model-backed (rivals) overseas.”

According to the report, online viewers can log in Grace’s test website gracebot.cn with Gmail or any other email addresses or accounts of Lark Suite, an enterprise collaboration platform developed by ByteDance, then successful login will lead the viewers to Grace’s chat user interface. Users can input any questions in the chat box and comment all the answers the bot gives with likes, dislikes, or ask the bot to regenerate its response, which are supposed to help improve its response, the report cited netizens’ screen shots of chats. Grace can generate images from input text. It was reported to generate multiple pictures of Doraemon if users ask it to produce a picture about the fictional character. The bot can also be used to improve the existing picture. It was said to offer more relevant options if users write specific prompts, such as drawing a landscape painting.

Generally speaking, Grace can basically meet users’ needs, though there is still room for improvement in terms of intelligent dialogue and drawing, the report commented.

News about ByteDance’s mysterious AI chatbot began to swirl two months ago. Tech Planet learned in the beginning of June that ByteDance’s conversational AI project is conducting internal test, and the project has a code name Grace. Bloomberg that month reported a ByteDance spokesperson confirmed the project but didn’t reveal more details. The report quoted an anonymous tester that a pop-up message to greet any employees as testers said Grace is based on several large language models (LLMs).

Other ByteDance’s businesses were reported to make their efforts in AI. TikTok was said in May to test out a chatbot called Tako, which can answer questions and talk to users of the popular short-video app. Volcengine, a subsidiary of ByteDance, has launched an enterprise-focused big model service platform called Volcano in late June.

Unlike other Chinese tech giants including Alibaba and Tencent, which applied their self-researched big models directly on cloud services, ByteDance is still in the early stage of big models. Volcano Ark is a big model service platform that offers businesses Model-as-a-Service solutions (MaaS). It provides services by integrating big models from other companies. The companies that provide big models for Volcano Ark include seven AI companies and research institutes, such as Baichuan Intelligence, MOSS of Fudan University, International Digital Economy Academy, Langboat, and MiniMax.

The AIGC market is deemed as a blue ocean amid heated AI race. UBS believes generative AI has the potential to be the biggest tech transformation since mobile or Internet 1.0., Nicolas Gaudois, head of research, ASEAN, and head of APAC technology at UBS, said in June. The global AIGC market size will reach to about $73.16 billion by 2030, up from $10.79 billion in 2022, the market research firm Precedence Research expected. The core market size of China's AIGC industry is expected to be RMB276.74 billion in 2028, around 35 times greater than that of RMB7.93 billion in 2023, according to iMedia Consulting.

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