TikTok owner ByteDance on Wednesday released an update to its flagship AI model aimed at challenging Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s latest reasoning model products, as a global race intensified to create AI models capable of tackling complex problems.

TikTok owner ByteDance plans to spend more than $12bn on artificial intelligence infrastructure this year, betting on the cutting-edge technology for new growth while under pressure from Washington to sell its popular video-sharing app in the US.

TikTok parent ByteDance has launched an updated version of Doubao, China’s most popular consumer-facing artificial intelligence (AI) app, as the tech giant accelerates AI development despite US export restrictions on advanced chips.

TikTok owner ByteDance has released upgrades to its large language model, which powers its AI chatbot, marking the social media giant's latest efforts to lead the global AI race. ByteDance's Doubao-1.5-Pro large language model demonstrated strong performance across global evaluation tests, the company said on its official WeChat account.

Beijing-headquartered Moonshot AI claims that Kimi K1.5 has caught up with OpenAI's O1, which debuted last month, in mathematics, coding, and multimodal reasoning capabilities. Similarly, Hangzhou-based DeepSeek said that DeepSeek-R1 performs on par with O1 in tasks such as math, coding, and natural language inference.

But the model is only meant to be used within China’s mainland, a ByteDance spokesperson told TechCrunch. The e-reader’s China-based manufacturer, Onyx International, which sells Boox e-readers in both China and to the U.

Google is making a fresh investment of more than $1 billion into OpenAI rival Anthropic, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.

ByteDance has launched an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered code editor in competition with American leaders like Cursor and Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, just after US President Donald Trump delayed the enforcement of a law requiring the company to divest TikTok.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced that three leading companies would make a large investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure.

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has launched an AI-powered code editor called Trae. The new tool comes as a competitor to established American players like Cursor and Microsoft 's Visual Studio Code. It has been launched just as US President Donald Trump decided to delay a law that would force ByteDance to divest from TikTok.

Larry, let’s negotiate in front of the media,” Trump said at a press conference with the Oracle co-founder, SoftBank CEO Masa Son, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to announce a $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure investment.

Led by Aravind Srinivas, artificial intelligence (AI) search engine start-up Perplexity AI has pitched a merger with TikTok in the US. The company's bid was submitted to TikTok's parent company ByteDance yesterday. The proposed new entity would include Perplexity, TikTok US and new capital partners.