TikTok owner ByteDance ratchets up internal test of AI chatbot ‘Grace’ as ChatGPT-like service gets tepid reception from some employees

Promoted with the slogan “your AI bud”, the Grace chatbot is currently accessible only to ByteDance corporate email account holders, who can log on and use the service via its website gracebot.cn.

Compared with the major AI chatbots widely available outside China such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, Grace was described by a ByteDance representative as “still immature’ and “lagging behind leading [AI chatbots] overseas”, according to a report on Monday by local media 36Kr.

On Tuesday, another ByteDance representative said in an emailed statement that Grace “will only be available in the China market”, while acknowledging that the chatbot is “currently undergoing more internal testing”.

A screenshot of the official website of “Grace”, the ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence chatbot developed by TikTok owner ByteDance. Photo: Handout.

Like ChatGPT, Grace was built with a generative AI algorithm, which is used to create new content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations and videos. Recent breakthroughs in this field have the potential to drastically change the way people approach content creation.

The current state of Grace, however, indicated that ByteDance remains behind other Chinese Big Tech companies that have already launched nationwide trials of their AI chatbots.

The consensus gathered from several employees who have used Grace was that the ByteDance chatbot failed to impress. These employees requested anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to media.

One employee on Tuesday cited as an example the chatbot’s perplexing response to the simple greeting of “Hi Grace”. It said: “Sorry, I’m not Grace. I am Grace.”

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Another employee said on Tuesday that she felt frustrated with Grace when she tried about a dozen times to get the chatbot to generate some marketing copy.

This employee said all the copy generated by Grace received a “thumbs down” from her.

While ByteDance continued its companywide testing of Grace, one employee asserted that they would not “get their hopes up” because of the way the service has performed so far.

Before Grace, ByteDance’s first reported crack at generative AI was in May, when the Beijing-based company posted on social media that it was “in the early stages” of developing “Tako”. This AI tool was supposed to help in searching content on its hit short video app TikTok for select users in the Philippines.

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At present, China’s government has yet to officially approve any domestic ChatGPT-style service.

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Other Chinese Big Tech firms have also been ahead of ByteDance in developing large language models (LLMs) – the technology used to train chatbots – for various applications in different industries. LLMs are deep-learning AI algorithms that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate content using very large data sets.

By comparison, ByteDance in late June launched a cloud computing platform to host AI models developed by other companies. Cloud computing services enable companies to buy, sell, lease or distribute a range of software and other digital resources as an on-demand service over the internet, just like electricity from a power grid.

Still, ByteDance is said to be developing its own LLM project, code-named “O” and started to actively hire LLM talent, according to a 36Kr report in July.

South China Morning Post