China's ByteDance has launched Doubao 2.0, an upgraded version of the country's most widely used artificial intelligence app, positioning it for the "agent era" where AI executes complex real-world tasks. The company announced the release on Saturday, aiming to generate buzz during the Lunar New Year holiday when hundreds of millions of Chinese return to their hometowns for family gatherings.

This move comes as ByteDance seeks to fend off domestic competition after rival Alibaba spent 3 billion yuan ($400 million) on coupons to boost its Qwen AI app. Alibaba's campaign helped daily active users skyrocket from 7 million to 58 million, nearly catching up to Doubao's figures. ByteDance's previous release, Seedance 2.0, already drew comparisons to DeepSeek's viral success after going viral on Chinese social media and earning praise from Elon Musk on X.

The upgraded model claims to match OpenAI's GPT 5.2 and Google's Gemini 3 Pro in complex reasoning and multi-step task execution while reducing costs by roughly an order of magnitude. With Doubao leading China's AI chatbot market at 155 million weekly active users compared to DeepSeek's 81.6 million, ByteDance aims to maintain its dominance as the AI landscape becomes increasingly competitive.