The AI application development platform Coze has announced the launch of its new version—Coze 1.5—at the Volcano Engine FORCE Power Conference. This update marks a significant step forward for the Coze platform in the field of AI application development, aiming to provide users with a more powerful and convenient development environment. The core highlight of Coze 1.5 is its support for a GUI (Graphical User Interface) development interface, allowing one-click publishing to various application formats such as mini programs, H5, and APIs. This feature enables users to quickly build applications based on large models, regardless of whether they have programming knowledge.

At the 2024 Volcano Engine FORCE Power Conference in Winter, ByteDance also launched the Global AI Search on Volcano Engine. This service integrates contextual search recommendations, enterprise private domain information integration, and connected Q&A services, closely aligning enterprise information, business needs, and user demands to help businesses achieve more precise recommendations and broader information discovery.

During the 2024 Volcano Engine FORCE Power Conference · Winter, Volcano Engine announced a brand new upgrade of the Doubao Large Model family, showcasing its latest advancements in the field of artificial intelligence. The daily tokens usage of the Doubao Large Model has exceeded 4 trillion, reflecting an increase of over 33 times since its release in May, demonstrating its widespread application and rapid growth in the industry.

On December 18th, at the Volcano Engine FORCE Power Conference, Volcano Engine President Tan Dai unveiled the new Doubao Visual Understanding Model. This model processes both text and image-related information simultaneously, providing more accurate answers. The new model excels in content recognition, understanding, and reasoning capabilities, featuring more nuanced visual description abilities, which brings stronger intelligent processing capabilities to enterprise users. Tan Dai revealed at the conference that the Doubao Visual Understanding Model has achieved significant technological breakthroughs and has also seen a dramatic reduction in pricing.

Recently, as ByteDance's Doubao Large Model accelerates its commercialization process and shows impressive performance in the global AI sector, the "Doubao" concept stocks have become the new favorites in the capital market, leading to a new round of price increases in the AI track. Several listed companies, including Tianyu Shuke, Juran Smart Home, and Bee Assistant, have seen their stock prices hit the daily limit for multiple days in a row, with Tianyu Shuke achieving 6 consecutive limits in 10 days by Friday's close, Juran Smart Home hitting 5 limits in 6 days, and Bee Assistant reaching a peak of 20CM limit up during trading. This reflects the market's strong optimism about the Doubao Large Model and its ecosystem.

On December 12, Peking University and ByteDance officially announced the establishment of the Doubao Large Model System Software Joint Laboratory, marking a new milestone in the collaboration between industry, academia, and research in China's AI field. The research work of the joint laboratory will be based on the Doubao large model independently developed by ByteDance. Researchers from universities and enterprises will conduct in-depth research on key technologies such as model training and inference within the laboratory. With the construction and development of the laboratory, a large number of Peking University students will also enter the laboratory for internships, working side by side with industry researchers.

A research team at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has recently unveiled an AI technology called SOLAMI, which can create lifelike 3D virtual characters that not only interact with you in real-time in the VR world but also understand your voice and movements, allowing for chatting, dancing, and even boxing! This is simply a blessing for gaming, virtual socializing, and singles alike! SOLAMI is an end-to-end social vision-language-action (VLA) modeling framework that leverages deep learning technology to translate user voice and movements into a form understandable by virtual characters.

According to Guangzhou Daily, on December 6th, news that 'ByteDance lured away Alibaba's large model talent with an eight-figure salary' quickly sparked heated discussions on social media. Reports indicate that Zhou Chang, the former technical leader of Alibaba's 'Tongyi Qianwen' large model, announced his departure to start a new venture on July 18 this year, but just two months later, there are reports that Zhou has quietly joined ByteDance. This news has been confirmed by relevant personnel from ByteDance. It is reported that Zhou's move is not a solo endeavor; more than ten members of his team have also joined him at ByteDance.

The Intelligent AI Assistant Doubao, developed by ByteDance, has recently upgraded its text-to-image capabilities. The new feature allows users to generate images containing specified text with a single click. The relevant person in charge of the Doubao large model team pointed out that the text-to-image model of Doubao integrates LLM (Large Language Model) and DIT (Digital Image Technology) framework, optimizing its learning ability for Chinese data, and enhancing the generation capability of Chinese characters, significantly improving the generation results.

ByteDance recently released a new feature for the Doubao application - Image Understanding. The Doubao app and PC version have added photo and camera buttons, allowing users to upload images for content recognition. Doubao's image understanding capability goes beyond text recognition; it can also analyze image content and even understand and explain jokes.

On November 28, Fudan University officially released the "Guidelines for Using AI Tools in Undergraduate Theses (Draft)", which provides detailed regulations on the application of AI tools during the thesis writing process. This move marks the first instance of a Chinese university issuing dedicated regulatory management documents in this field, filling a policy gap. According to the guidelines, Fudan University allows students to use AI tools under specific conditions. Students may use these tools upon obtaining approval from their supervising teachers, provided that it does not hinder the assessment of their innovative capabilities.

The Haidian District People's Court in Beijing has officially accepted ByteDance's lawsuit against former intern Tian, accusing him of altering code to attack the company's internal model training. The company requests the court to order Tian to compensate for 8 million yuan in damages and 20,000 yuan in reasonable expenses, while also demanding a public apology.

Recently, researchers from ByteDance Research Institute and Tsinghua University jointly released a new study, pointing out that current AI video generation models, such as OpenAI's Sora, while capable of creating stunning visual effects, have significant flaws in understanding basic physical laws. This study has sparked widespread discussion on the capabilities of AI in simulating reality. The research team tested AI video generation models under three different scenarios: predictions under known patterns and predictions under unknown patterns.

Tesla founder Elon Musk has recently filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the organization of abandoning its original non-profit mission. According to the latest complaint, Musk has also added multiple defendants, including Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and former OpenAI board member and Microsoft executive D. Templeton. Source note: Image generated by AI, image licensed from service provider Midjourney. This lawsuit was filed in a district court in California.