ByteDance is quietly winning a race in China that most people are watching in America. The company behind TikTok now makes about $4bn a year from artificial intelligence. That is the largest figure any Chinese firm has publicly claimed, the South China Morning Post reported.
To press that lead, ByteDance is tearing up part of its own structure. It is folding Lark, its Slack-style workplace app known as Feishu at home, into the teams behind its Doubao chatbot and its cloud business. The plan comes from an internal memo seen by the paper.
Absorbing the office app
The reshuffle is telling. Lark’s product team will merge into the group that runs Doubao, ByteDance’s answer to ChatGPT, under Zhao Qi, who until now oversaw Doubao alone. Lark’s sales and support staff move to Volcano Engine, ByteDance’s cloud arm, to sell AI models and software to businesses. Its engineers join Flow, a division focused on AI apps.
In plain terms, ByteDance is breaking up a standalone product and redistributing it around AI. The company said the goal was “stronger AI product competitiveness and customer service capabilities.” The message to staff is clear. The chatbot and the cloud, not the office suite, are the future.
Big in China, small next to the US
The $4bn puts ByteDance ahead of China’s better-known AI names. It is more than DeepSeek, Moonshot or Alibaba have disclosed. But it is still tiny beside the American leaders. OpenAI and Anthropic each run at many times that. The figure says more about the gap with US AI than about any Chinese lead.
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
Money is the thing China’s labs keep circling. Most give their best models away to win users. They are only now working out how to charge for them. A firm that can already book $4bn has a head start.
A bet across the whole stack
The restructure is one piece of a larger push. ByteDance is spending across every layer of AI at once, from frontier models and its Seedance video generator to infrastructure and chips. The Financial Times reported the effort in detail, and noted that some see it as a big gamble.
The video bet is already visible. ByteDance’s Seedance model is powering a wave of AI-made short dramas in China, compressing months of production into weeks. The research firm DataEye expects China’s AI short-drama market to reach 40 billion yuan ($5.9bn) this year, with viewers already past 600 million.
Set alongside its other AI experiments, it points to a company trying to be everywhere in AI at once. The Lark reshuffle is simply where that ambition met the org chart.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.