TikTok owner ByteDance has surprised the artificial intelligence industry with the ultra-low cost of its Doubao model, which the company said is capable of processing 2 million Chinese characters, equivalent to 1.25 million tokens, for RMB 1 ($0.14). OpenAI’s most advanced multimodal model, GPT-4o, also unveiled this week, comes in at $5 per million input tokens handled. “Large usage polishes a good model and dramatically reduces the unit cost of model inference,” he added. Details: ByteDance’s Doubao large model family consists of nine versions, ranging from a “lite version” to the advanced Doubao Pro, which is able to deal with up to 128,000 token inputs. The company did not disclose how many parameters it used to train its most powerful Doubao Pro model.