On 24 January, it was reported that ByteDance, the owner of TikTok and its China sister app Douyin had officially established a project codenamed “Seed Edge”. The project is to research artificial general intelligence (AGI), a more long-term goal than training large language models (LLMs), as well as AI hardware. Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, is reportedly spearheading the project, along with other AI-related projects at the company. Their competitor, Rednote, on the other hand, took a more practical route.
Formerly known as Xiaohongshu, RED and REDnote, the platform recently unified its name in the West as Rednote, stylised as “rednote” on both the Apple App Store for iOS and Google Play for Android. Rednote launched its AI project in 2023 and has been optimising its AI search function since last year.
However, the lifestyle platform’s latest AI venture is arguably its best-known, the AI translation tool that it urgently launched this year during the “TikTok refugee” wave of American user registrations. The auto-translate function was introduced days after the refugees joined the platform and people have been impressed with its functions and speed. From fictional languages to Morse code and classical Chinese, machine translations can do much more than English-to-Chinese translations. People quickly figured out that its capabilities go beyond a translator and more likely an LLM. It is not yet confirmed, however, which model it is and whether it is proprietary from Rednote.
Since last year, tech companies and platforms in China are doubling down on AI models. Search engine giant Baidu released its own AI search function in response to competitors like Rednote as it threatens Baidu’s position as the top search engine in China. Even food delivery platform Meituan launched its AI assistant for ordering. With competitors in China and abroad, from dedicated tech startups to fellow platforms, ByteDance and Rednote are taking radically different approaches.
