ByteDance Releases Doubao 2.0 to Compete with DeepSeek

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ByteDance Releases Doubao 2.0 to Compete with DeepSeek

ByteDance rolled out Doubao 2.0, an upgrade to China's most popular AI chatbot, just as the Lunar New Year holiday began. The company, which was caught off-guard by DeepSeek's meteoric rise during last year's Spring Festival, is making an aggressive push to defend its market position.

Doubao now has over 163 million monthly active users and is deeply integrated into Douyin, China's TikTok equivalent. Meanwhile, Alibaba launched a 3 billion yuan coupon campaign for its Qwen AI app, which briefly closed the gap in daily active users. (Source)

ByteDance to Challenge Google's Nano Banana Image Model

ByteDance unveiled Seedream 5.0, an AI image generator the company claims rivals Google's popular Nano Banana Pro at a lower price point. Available for beta testing on Jimeng and CapCut, the model offers enhanced reasoning, accuracy, and edit control.

Hours later, Alibaba Cloud released Qwen-Image-2.0, which it says outperforms Nano Banana Pro when rendering Chinese characters. The announcements kicked off an intense week of AI competition between China's tech giants, with both companies also spending billions on user acquisition campaigns during the Lunar New Year holiday. (Source)

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AI & Tech News

Microsoft Copilot Reaches 15 Million Paid Seats, Azure Grows 38%

Microsoft's Q2 fiscal 2026 earnings revealed that Microsoft 365 Copilot has surpassed 15 million paid seats, with adoption growing 160% quarter over quarter. Azure revenue increased 38% in constant currency as AI-driven cloud demand accelerated.

The company also expanded model choice in its Foundry platform with GPT-5.2 and Claude 4.5, alongside regional models from Mistral and Cohere. Commercial backlog reached $625 billion, up 110% year over year. CEO Satya Nadella described the momentum as proof that AI is transitioning "from innovation to everyday infrastructure." (Source)

TSMC Surges as Analysts Predict It Will Outperform Nvidia in 2026

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing stock has climbed over 43% in six months as analysts bet it will outperform Nvidia this year. The chipmaker manufactures nearly three-quarters of the world's chips and produces the AI processors for Nvidia, AMD, Apple, Broadcom, and Qualcomm.

With Alphabet and Amazon each planning to spend up to $200 billion on AI infrastructure, TSMC is positioned to capture much of that spend. Revenue is expected to grow 30% to $159 billion. Shares still trade at 15 times sales versus Nvidia's 24, making it an attractive value play for those betting on continued AI hardware demand. (Source)

Google DeepMind Unveils Aletheia, an AI Agent for Autonomous Research

Google DeepMind introduced Aletheia, an AI system designed to conduct professional-level mathematical research with minimal human intervention. Built on Gemini Deep Think, the system achieved 95.1% accuracy on IMO-level math problems while requiring 100 times less compute than earlier versions.

In a first, Aletheia generated a research paper on arithmetic geometry entirely without human guidance and autonomously resolved four open questions from the Erdős Conjectures database. The system uses a three-part architecture: a generator for solutions, a verifier for checking flaws, and a reviser for corrections. (Source)

Anthropic's Cowork Plugins

A wave of AI anxiety swept through Wall Street this week after Anthropic released industry-specific plugins for its Claude Cowork workplace assistant. Thomson Reuters fell more than 26%, LegalZoom dropped over 15%, and shares of Salesforce, Intuit, Snowflake, and ServiceNow all tumbled.

The plugins let businesses automate legal research, financial analysis, marketing tasks, and data work. OpenAI quickly followed with competing features. While some analysts argue the selloff is overblown, others see it as an early signal that AI is ready to displace traditional enterprise software functions. (Source)

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