(Yicai) May 16 -- Volcano Engine, the cloud computing services unit of TikTok owner ByteDance, has debuted nine models under its large language model Doubao, pricing its main enterprise model over 99 percent cheaper than the industry average.

Doubao's enterprise model costs 0.0008 Chinese cents (0.00011 US cents) per 1,000 tokens, or 99.3 percent less than the industry average, Tan Dai, president of Volcano Engine, said at a launch event yesterday. Models of other enterprises with the same specifications are priced on average 12 Chinese cents (2 US cents) per 1,000 tokens, he noted.

Doubao, which debuted as Skylark last August and was among the first LLMs to pass China's algorithm registry, now is processing an average of 120 billion text tokens and generating 30 million pictures a day, according to Tan. A good LLM can only be trained with large usage, which can also significantly lower its unit costs, he added.

A huge change in the sector this year is the big increase in LLMs' capabilities, Tan noted. Developing applications has become very important and requires the prosperity of the ecosystem, he said.

Cutting costs is key in driving LLMs to leap forward to a phase of value creation, Tan noted, adding that LLM applications are still at an early stage, and lowering costs will advance their broader use.

Based on its LLM, ByteDance has built the artificial intelligence chat assistant Doubao, the AI app development platform Coze, the interactive entertainment app Parallel Odyssey, and AI creation tools such as Butterfly Unicorn and Dreamnia. It has also integrated the model into over 50 businesses, including Douyin, the Chinese sister app of TikTok, Fanqie Novel, Feishu, and Oceanengine, to enhance efficiency and optimize product experience.

Doubao collaborated with numerous enterprise clients of Volcano Engine to create the nine models, which include pro and lite editions of generic, speech recognition, speech synthesis, and text-to-picture models. 

Editors: Zhang Yuhsuo, Martin Kadiev