Doubao model family (Doubao Pro, 2024)

What Doubao is

Doubao is the large language model family that ByteDance released through Volcano Engine, its cloud unit, for enterprise customers. Volcano Engine announced the family at an event in Beijing on 15 May 2024, presented by Volcano Engine president Tan Dai.^[1] It launched with nine models: Pro and Lite editions of a general-purpose model, plus Pro and Lite editions of speech-recognition, speech-synthesis and text-to-image models.^[1]

Where it came from

The Doubao family was the public rebrand of Skylark, the model that had debuted in August 2023. At the point of the rebrand, Skylark was handling about 120 billion text tokens and 30 million images a day.^[1] A token is the small unit of text — roughly a word fragment — that a model reads and writes; services are usually billed per thousand or per million of them.

What the models offer

The high-end Doubao Pro supports up to 128,000 tokens of context, while Doubao Lite is the entry-level model in the lineup.^[2] Context is the amount of text a model can hold in view at once, so a long context allows a single request to carry long documents. The 128K-context general model was priced at 0.005 yuan per 1,000 tokens, which ByteDance said was 95.8% cheaper than the industry.^[5]

Pricing

Price was the centre of the launch. The main model was offered at 0.0008 yuan per 1,000 prompt tokens, which Caixin described as 99.8% cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-4.^[2] Tan said comparable enterprise models averaged 0.12 yuan per 1,000 tokens.^[1] Jiemian later put the launch price of Doubao Pro-32k at 0.8 yuan per million tokens, against up to 120 yuan at some competitors.^[3]

The consumer side

Doubao also existed as a chatbot app for ordinary users, not only as a service sold to companies. At launch the app had more than 100 million downloads and over 26 million monthly active users, and ByteDance planned to integrate Doubao into more than 50 of its own apps.^[2] ByteDance said more than 8 million agents had been created on the Doubao platform, according to a May 2024 report by PEDAILY.^[5]

Why it mattered

The launch was widely described as setting off a price war among Chinese enterprise LLM providers.^[4] Usage grew quickly from that starting point: daily token usage topped 4 trillion by late 2024, a 33-fold increase since launch.^[3] That trajectory placed Doubao among the most heavily used model families in China, with a consumer app, an enterprise API and an agent-building platform all carrying the same name.