China’s “big tech” giants – including Alibaba Group Holding, ByteDance and Tencent Holdings – released preliminary figures showing impressive gains for their new flagship artificial intelligence offerings during this year’s Spring Festival Gala marketing blitz.
TikTok-owner ByteDance was one of the first to report its gains, after its cloud computing unit Volcano Engine and consumer AI app Doubao were featured continuously during Monday’s Spring Festival Gala staged by state broadcaster China Central Television.
According to ByteDance, there were 1.9 billion interactions across its AI services on the day, with Doubao seeing 63.3 billion tokens processed per minute at its peak on the night.
Tokens are the fundamental units of data read or generated by AI models, equivalent to small chunks of text or pixels in an image. In comparison, ChatGPT developer OpenAI said in October that it processed 6 billion tokens per minute through its application programming interface, or API.
ByteDance’s viral video generation model Seedance 2.0 was also closely integrated with the gala’s programming that night, with several pre-recorded segments generated by the model.