ByteDance’s Pragmatic AI Strategy: A Factor in Its Lag Behind OpenAI and Its Approach to Catching Up
April 24, 2024 β 00:28
Investment Research Team
ByteDance, the Chinese technology conglomerate and parent of TikTok, has launched the Chinese version of Coze, an artificial intelligence (AI) development platform tailored for crafting next-generation AI chatbots.
Testing of the Coze platform reveals that it has some significant gap to fill in order to catch up with industry leaders such as ChatGPT. On the other hand, Coze offers some unique features that are lacking elsewhere.
According to ByteDance’s own description, Coze is a new generation of AI Bot development platform.
"As long as you have ideas, you can quickly and easily build your own Chatbot using Coze, and publish it to Doubao, Feishu, WeChat official account and other channels with one click!"
Coze was developed by Flow, a newly established AI department within ByteDance. The latter has currently launched two products, Doubao and Cici. The domestic version of Coze is similar to the overseas version that was launched initially in the international markets earlier.
When using Coze, users only need to directly input "I want to create a Bot" on the platform, and Coze will provide Bot creation ideas.
Coze also provides a Bot store and plugins, with selected Bots covering various categories such as tools, entertainment, lifestyle, consulting, creativity and learning.
Coze integrates a relatively rich set of plugins and tools, which can greatly expand the capabilities of Bots.
Among the built-in plugins, the platform has integrated more than 60 types of APIs and multi-modal models, including information reading, travel, efficient office work, image understanding, and more.
Users can directly add these plugins to their Bots to enrich their capabilities. For example, using the news plugin can be designed as an AI news anchor that can broadcast the latest current affairs news.
Users can also customize their own plugins by quickly creating one through parameter configuration and making it callable by the Bot using existing API capabilities.
Coze provides a simple and easy-to-use knowledge base function to manage and store data, and also supports data interaction between the Bot and users. Whether it’s a large amount of local files or real-time information from a website, it can be uploaded to the knowledge base.
This also means that the Bot can use the content in the knowledge base to answer questions.
In terms of content format, the knowledge base supports adding data in text format, table format.
When uploading content, users can upload local TXT, PDF, DOCX, Excel, CXV format documents to the knowledge base, or obtain online webpage content and API JSON data based on URLs. Users can also directly add custom data within the knowledge base.
Coze emphasizes its ability to persistently remember important parameters or content from user conversations.
For example, creating a database to record reading notes, including book titles, reading progress, and personal annotations. With the database, the Bot can provide more accurate answers by querying the data stored in the database.
Coze provides combinable nodes including large language models (LLM), custom code, judgment logic, etc. Whether you have programming experience or not, you can quickly build a workflow by dragging and dropping nodes.
Users can create a workflow to collect movie reviews and quickly view comments and ratings for a new movie; or create a workflow to write an industry research report and let the Bot write a 20-page report.
Since the AI Bot itself cannot directly access the internet, various plugins and tools can be added to extend its functionality. These include Bing search, ByteArtist, image understanding, Toutiao search, and more.
After creating the Bot, you can choose the publishing platform of your AI generated content with one click. The Chinese version offers publishing platforms including Feishu, WeChat, among others.
The biggest challenge for users after testing is the long wait time. When asking the Bot to write a children’s story, the first story took 29.9 seconds to load, and the second took 34.9 seconds. That is a rather long time to wait compared to what other platforms offer.
Moreover, the platform often goes down when testing Coze. The continuous internet outages make the user experience a bit frustrating.
Inconsistent relevance and incorrect responses were observed during testing, including bot’s inability to correctly answer simple math questions. Slow response speed and frequent errors make Coze challenging to retain users.
When compared to competitors, Coze falls short in current form, but potential for improvement with additional resources and investment from ByteDance is promising.
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