ByteDance’s Volcano Engine Unveils Affordable AI Coding Agent
Volcano Engine, the cloud division of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has introduced a novel coding assistant priced at a mere 9.9 yuan (approximately RM5.75 or US$1.30) for the initial month of its subscription.
This strategic move underscores the intensifying rivalry in China’s flourishing market for artificial intelligence developer tools.
The newly launched Doubao-Seed-Code model, announced on Tuesday, will incur a standard monthly fee of 40 yuan (RM23), as detailed in a company statement. This promotional offer coincides with China’s annual Singles’ Day shopping extravaganza on November 11.
ByteDance is accelerating its investment in artificial intelligence, with the utilization of its Doubao chatbot having doubled over the past six months.
Volcano Engine President Tan Dai articulated this growth during a corporate gathering in October, signifying a surge in AI adoption amongst Chinese consumers and bolstering ByteDance’s stature among the preeminent players in the global AI arena.
The newly minted model has established a cutting-edge benchmark on the SWE-Bench Verified test, positioning itself alongside leading systems such as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet.
This launch arrives on the heels of Anthropic, a US-based AI startup, enhancing its service restrictions in September to deny access to subsidiaries of Chinese companies—a reflection of the increasingly polarized international AI landscape.
Volcano Engine asserts that Doubao-Seed-Code is compatible with widely-used development tools, including veCLI, Cursor, and Cline, and it integrates seamlessly with APIs like Anthropic’s.
The company touts the agent as the most economically accessible coding assistant in China, pricing it approximately 62.7% below the industry average.
The latest iteration of Doubao can process queries containing up to 256,000 words, enabling it to manage intricate codebases and accelerate full-stack application development.
Volcano Engine states that Doubao-Seed-Code is built on a comprehensive, agent-intensive training system and has been fully assimilated into its Singapore-based coding application, Trae.
This integration materialized a mere six days following ByteDance’s cessation of access to Anthropic’s Claude models, which was a direct consequence of the American firm’s service realignment affecting Chinese-owned entities globally.
Upon merging with the Trae platform, the model attained a commendable score of 78.8% on the SWE-Bench Verified benchmark, as communicated in the company statement.
In recent months, the landscape for Chinese AI development has been marked by a flurry of new models, such as Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 reasoning variant and MiniMax’s M2, which have elicited comparisons to the pioneering “DeepSeek moment” that invigorated China’s AI sector.
Source link: Thestar.com.my.
