AI 2026: China’s Super-App Giant ByteDance Bets On AI Smartphones
The parent company of TikTok is one of the world's most profitable companies and is exploring how to leverage AI to dominate the next iteration of social media and smartphones.
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ByteDance, best known as the creator of the popular short-form video app TikTok, is also one of China’s largest cloud computing providers, hosts ByteDance Seed—one of the country’s largest frontier AI research labs—and owns the AI assistant app Doubao. The Doubao app is their main consumer product and had over 170 million monthly active users in China as of October 2025, meaning they have the most active users in the country, ranking above DeepSeek’s app’s 145 million monthly active users.1 ByteDance has the advantage of being able to train its multimodal models on user-submitted videos from TikTok and its Chinese equivalent, Douyin. Douyin, however, is not just a social media platform but also the third largest e-commerce platform in China.2 ByteDance’s stated aim is to integrate AI agents into every facet of how people interact with the internet and offer an immersive consumer entertainment, e-commerce, and social media experience within their own “super-app” ecosystem, something the company’s founder Zhang Yiming, who de facto still leads the company, believes will fundamentally transform user retention and satisfaction.