China’s teDance releases Doubao 2.0 AI model for ‘agent era’ | Technology News
3 min readNew DelhiFeb 15, 2026 09:43 AM China’s teDance has rolled out its Doubao 2.0 model, an upgrade of the country’s most widely used artificial-intelligence app, the company said on Saturday. teDance is one of several Chinese firms hoping to generate overseas and domestic buzz around its new AI models during the Lunar New Year holiday, which starts on Sunday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese partake in family gatherings in their hometowns.ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW VIDEO
The company, like rival Alibaba, was caught off-guard DeepSeek’s meteoric rise to global fame during last year’s Spring Festival, when Silicon Valley and investors worldwide were shocked how a Chinese firm had come up with a model comparable to OpenAI’s best but seemingly developed at a fraction of the cost.
The release of Doubao 2.0, ahead of a highly anticipated new DeepSeek model, is likely aimed at preventing such a scenario from repeating itself. A video-generation AI model that teDance released on Thursday, Seedance 2.0, has already drawn comparisons with DeepSeek’s success last year after going viral on Chinese social media and drawing praise overseas on platforms like X, including from its owner Elon Musk.
Doubao 2.0 is positioned for the “agent era”, where AI models are expected to execute complex real-world tasks rather than only answer questions, teDance said in a statement.
The model’s pro version includes complex reasoning and multi-step task execution capabilities that match OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, while reducing usage costs roughly an order of magnitude, according to the company.
“This cost advantage will become even more crucial as real-world, complex tasks involve large-scale inference and multi-step generation that will expend a huge amount of tokens,” teDance said, referring to the unit of data processed an AI model.
Doubao leads all AI chatbot apps in China with 155 million weekly active users, with DeepSeek second at 81.6 million, according to information provider QuestMobile’s most recent data, published in late December.Story continues below this ad
But Doubao 2.0’s release could help teDance fend off recent pressure from domestic competitors. Alibaba on February 6 announced it was spending 3 billion yuan ($400 million) on a coupon giveaway campaign to attract more users to its Qwen AI app, allowing them to use the incentives to purchase food and drink directly in the chatbot.
This led daily active users on Qwen to skyrocket from 7 million to 58 million, just 23 million shy of Doubao’s figures on the same day, according to QuestMobile.
