ByteDance Shifts AI Focus to Enterprise Products as Consumer Chatbot Costs Rise, Report Says

ByteDance is reallocating its AI resources away from consumer-facing products such as Doubao and toward enterprise services, amid high operating costs and challenges monetizing consumer AI offerings, LatePost reported. According to ChainCatcher, Doubao has more than 200 million daily active users, but its inference and multimodal computing costs run into tens of millions of yuan per day, while daily revenue from monetization channels such as e-commerce is under 1 million yuan. The report said ByteDance’s video-generation model Seedance is showing stronger profitability. Seedance 2.0, built on a 200-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts architecture with relatively lower reliance on inference compute, is reported to have a 70% gross margin. Most of its revenue comes from enterprise customers, and its annual recurring revenue has reached $2 billion. People familiar with the matter said ByteDance expanded its large-model data review team to more than 3,000 people this year, mainly to clean training data for coding models. The report added that Volcano Engine’s model-as-a-service business has been elevated in priority, with top management setting a goal to increase revenue tenfold and accelerate overseas expansion. It also said ByteDance executives recently visited Anthropic, whose enterprise AI coding services have driven significant revenue and valuation growth, providing a reference point for ByteDance’s strategic shift.