Douyin is betting on AI, and Zhang Yiming is recruiting
According to the news, Douyin's AI department has expanded by more than 100 people
The birth of the Wensheng video model Sora has become the king of the new year, and for a while, "who will become the Chinese version of Sora" has become a hot topic inside and outside the industry.
The emergence of Sora has also sent a signal to the short video industry, urging it to accelerate its AI exploration.
Sina Technology reported that the Flow department of Douyin Group is under the product development and engineering department (internal abbreviation "PDI"), and currently has four major business lines, including AI education, internationalization, community and bean bag.
Source: Stove APP details page
There are more than 100 people in the Flow department, and the department has also carried out a round of headcount inventory before the Chinese New Year, and is still recruiting a large number of positions such as production and research through social recruitment, and some of them are leader-level positions, in addition, school recruitment has also started recently.
A Byte employee said that many employees of Wenxin Yiyan and Alibaba Cloud have jumped to the Flow department, but the employee also revealed that the work intensity of the entire department is very high, "6 days a week by default, and sometimes overtime on Sundays." ”
It is understood that Douyin only established Flow in November last year, focusing on the research and development of AI large model applications. Jun Zhu, vice president of product and strategy at Byte, and Dingkun Hong, vice president of Byte Technology, serve as the product leader and technical leader of the department, respectively.
According to a person close to Douyin, Douyin has transferred elite soldiers from the whole group to support the department's AI business in the future, and some of TikTok's core product personnel have also been transferred to Flow.
In recent years, artificial intelligence has become a popular profession, and AI talent is technical productivity, which is contested by all walks of life. Maimai data shows that among the jobs with the largest number of new jobs in the new economy industry in 2023, artificial intelligence-related jobs are the most scarce.
From January to October 2023, among the 15 companies that recruited the most AI talents, Douyin ranked first with a recruitment ratio of 4.03%, Xiaohongshu ranked second with a proportion of 3.29%, followed by Meituan, Alibaba, Ant Group, Tencent, etc.
Source: Maimai Data
Recently, Meta has taken a series of innovative measures to attract more outstanding AI experts to join in order to cope with the increasingly fierce market competition.
These measures include offering job offers directly to AI researchers without interviews and offering salary increases to employees who plan to leave their jobs, according to people familiar with the matter. Meta believes that AI technology will be a key driver of future technology and economic development, so it is important to increase investment to stay ahead of the industry.
No matter how the competitive environment changes, in the final analysis, it is still the competition for talent. Previously, it was reported that the business groups of the Douyin Flow department are very volatile, and there is a shortage of people, since November last year, Flow has opened "living water" positions in batches to absorb personnel from other business departments.
According to sources, Flow is a key team for Douyin to invest heavily in developing its AI business. The company is willing to invest in the development of large AI models and their product functions, and does not require revenue returns in the short term, with the aim of creating a national-level AI application.
In addition, in addition to Flow, other important business units of Douyin Group are also increasing their AI products and services, including Douyin e-commerce, Douyin life services, volcano engine, giant engine, rare earth nuggets, Toutiao, Dali Education, Jianying, etc.
Douyin, which is slow and half-beating, is desperately trying to catch up
Douyin Group CEO Liang Rubo said at the annual all-staff meeting in January this year that Byte's progress in the field of AI has been slow, and it is not until 2023 that it began to seriously consider GPT technology, while many high-performing large-scale model startups have been founded and started developing products as early as 2018 and 2021.
In the first half of last year, Baidu and Ali successively launched their own large language models Wenyan Yixin and Tongyi Qianwen. Douyin only opened the lark model to the public in August last year.
In fact, Douyin, known as the "APP factory", has also launched some AI function attempts before, such as AI painting, Feishu AI intelligent companion, etc.
It wasn't until the establishment of Flow last year that Douyin's layout in AI began to be systematic.
At present, Douyin Group has launched more than 10 AI products at home and abroad, such as Cici, Coze, AI character interactive apps "Talk" and "AI Search", "Douyin Xiaoqing" for AI emotional chat robots, "Instant Creation" for e-commerce content creation, and ChitChop, a collection of AI tools.
In addition, before the launch of Sora, Douyin also launched a low-key video model product, Boximator, which can accurately control the movements of people or objects in the video through text.
However, soon Douyin related people said that Boximator is currently unable to land as a perfect product, and there is still a big gap between it and the leading foreign video generation model in terms of picture quality, fidelity, and video duration.
Last month, Zhang Nan, the former CEO of Douyin Group, resigned as the group's CEO and will focus on the development of Jianying in the future. Zhang Nan is personally leading the team to seek a breakthrough in AI-assisted creation, and plans to launch an AI-generated and video product.
AI video is undoubtedly a big outlet, and as Douyin, which has built a short video trend around the world, AI video is an important opportunity that should not be missed.
At the same time, Alibaba and Baidu are also constantly catching up with cutting-edge AI technology. Recently, Alibaba Group's Intelligent Computing Institute launched an audio-driven portrait-to-video generation framework, EMO (Emote Portrait Alive). The result allows Audrey Hepburn to start "singing" and the Mona Lisa to "speak".
Introduction to the EMO framework Source: GitHub official website
Last year, Baidu also launched the Wensheng video tool "Du plus editing", the main functions include AI copywriting, AI teleprompters, intelligent subtitles, fast editing, AI digital humans, etc., but the tool does not support direct video generation based on text.
The AI track is fiercely competitive, and major manufacturers have tried their best, although they know that this is a money-burning road, but they still have no hesitation. Because on this road, players are like sailing against the current, and if they don't advance, they will retreat.
In recent years, Douyin has made significant progress in the field of e-commerce, but it is also an indisputable fact that the traffic dividend is decreasing in the Internet era.
In the future, AI will be a new growth direction for e-commerce. Jack Ma also said: The era of AI e-commerce has just begun, and it is both an opportunity and a challenge for everyone.
In the Internet era, whether it is e-commerce, social networking, search and other fields, products have the value of being reshaped, but after entering the AI era, this logic still applies, and existing applications can be reshaped and upgraded with AI technology.
AI social networking has become a breakthrough in Douyin
In 2023, all walks of life will be rolled up in large models for a year, and AI technology will gradually move towards front-end applications and quickly penetrate into public life, from AI painting, AI writing, to AI digital humans...... However, in the era of AI, there are no real super applications yet.
Super apps herald the traffic entrance of the future. Just like in the Internet era, WeChat has opened the door to a new digital lifestyle.
Although ChatGPT has opened the "Pandora's box" of generative AI, AI applications such as ChatGPT are more tool-oriented, not only limited to technical cost constraints, but also more difficult to let go on the road to commercialization. At the beginning of this year, OpenAI's COO revealed that ChatGPT Enterprise had only 150,000 subscribers.
Compared with instrumental AI, social AI products are more likely to reach a large number of user groups, and based on the continuous accumulation of user scale, they are bound to run through the commercialization link by optimizing the user experience and creating more user value.
iResearch predicts that the scale of the mainland AIGC industry is expected to exceed one trillion yuan in 2030, reaching 1,144.1 billion yuan, and social networking is one of the best landing scenarios for AIGC.
The first AI social product to become popular was Character.AI (hereinafter referred to as C.AI). SimilarWeb data shows that C.AI is second only to OpenAI's page views and has become the hottest product after ChatGPT.
According to statistics, in the ranking of the average daily usage time (minutes) of social software in the United States, C.AI even surpassed TikTok, ranking second.
Source: Market capitalization list
Nowadays, AI social networking has become a track that major manufacturers are competing to chase. Apps such as MiniMax's Hoshino, Douyin's Hasho, Tencent's QQ "AI Chat Partner", Tsukumengdao, Baidu's Wanhua, and Meituan's WOW all have imitation C.AI that allow users to create personalized AI chatbots on the platform.
Take Douyin's just-launched "Conversation Furnace" as an example, which is a chat product driven by the Douyin Skylark model, where users can interact with AI characters in real time to meet a variety of needs from casual to in-depth communication. Users can choose from different AI avatars to start conversations.
In addition to dialogue and interaction with virtual characters, there are also mini-games such as memorizing words, turtle soup and idiom solitaire.
The combination of AI and social networking is not only focused on the technical base, but also requires more consideration on how to effectively integrate AI technology and user scenarios to create new business value.
In many current products, the main thing is the virtual social relationship between humans and AI, and this kind of "socialization" cannot be called social in the true sense. Even due to some technical problems, some virtual characters often appear to have problems such as "lack of intelligence" and frequent "amnesia", which greatly affects the user experience.
To build a super APP, AI social networking is a major breakthrough, but it is also a major problem, and the most important thing is to find the user's usage scenarios and demand tipping point.
The launch of "Talker" is just the beginning, and Douyin will face more challenges in the future.
Author | Pandora