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TikTok owner ByteDance has joined the ChatGPT bandwagon along with Baidu and Alibaba Group Holding, by testing a chatbot powered by large language models (LLM).
The project, with the code name "Grace", is an "experimental artificial intelligence chatbot that is still in its infancy and for internal testing only," a ByteDance representative said on Friday.
The chatbot has been built within Feishu, ByteDance's enterprise collaboration platform known as Lark overseas, according to one of the testers who experienced it last month. The testing has involved only a select group of employees for the time being, said the person, who asked not to be named as the information is not public yet.
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This will be the second time ByteDance has attempted to latch on to the trend of generative AI, as companies worldwide seek to match the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which was launched last year to much fanfare. ChatGPT is not officially available in China.
In May, the company tweeted that it was "in the early stages" of exploring a chatbot named Tako, an AI-powered tool to help with search content on its short video hit app TikTok, with select users in the Philippines.
TikTok and its domestic sister app Douyin, owe a lot of their commercial success to their popular algorithm recommendations, which direct users to related content that they may want to view.
Since its inception in 2012, ByteDance has been a proponent of AI, which sits behind the algorithms that feed curated content to users based on their interests and activity. All of its flagship products, including news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, use this proprietary AI-powered recommendation system, often referred to as ByteDance's secret sauce.
The company also applies AI to video optimisation, developing filters and special effects to entertain short video users.
Baidu was the first major internet company in China to launch a ChatGPT-like service, named Ernie Bot, in March. Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, also rolled out its alternative, Tongyi Qianwen, in April. Other firms, such as AI developer SenseTime and voice recognition developer iFlyTek, have also joined the fray.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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