TikTok Owner May Soon Launch Its Own Chatbot Platform, Memo Says

TikTok's owner ByteDance is joining in on the AI craze with a chatbot platform launching soon, according to an internal memo seen by the South China Morning Post.

Reports indicate that the Chinese company is developing a new open platform where users can create their custom chatbots. The public beta is set to be released by the end of the month.

ByteDance follows after leading Chinese tech companies Baidu and Alibaba in the strategic shift to "explore new generative AI products and how they can integrate with the existing ones."

The social media giant was also reported to be working on a text-to-image generative AI for quite some time now, SCMP added.

ByteDance has been involved in AI development since the launch of TikTok with its recommendation algorithm.

The unnamed platform is set to compete in a growing AI market with OpenAI's ChatGPT on the lead.

AI Chatbot Platform on Mainland China

The presence of ChatGPT and cloud-based chatbots has been a longstanding contention between the US and China.

OpenAI's products remain unavailable to mainland China with Microsoft the only one yet planning to push the GPT-powered Copilot in Hong Kong.

To answer to a fast-growing market, Baidu unveiled the first ChatGPT rival in China called Ernie Bot last March.

Baidu soon also released Qianfan in the same month as a "one-stop platform" for businesses to develop large language models and services used in OpenAI's products.

Only recently did Alibaba also jump into the AI game with LLM development platform Bailian last October.

TikTok and AI Usage

As for the main TikTok platform itself, the social media have been incorporating various AI tools to attract young users to the platform.

TikTok is known for introducing various filters that use AI. There is also the recently debuted AI assistant to help users navigate the "For You" page and ad creation.

Several US lawmakers have previously expressed concerns regarding data privacy on the app with rampant use of AI, as well as the growing disinformation via deep fakes and AI generation.