ByteDance, the Chinese firm behind TikTok, is in the process of creating an open platform that enables users to construct their own chatbots, marking its entry into the generative AI market, similar to OpenAI GPTs.

An internal memo obtained by SCMP reveals that the anticipated launch of the “bot development platform” as a public beta is slated for the end of the month. 

Additionally, ByteDance is reportedly engaged in the development of a text-to-image generator akin to Midjourney. These endeavors are indicative of the company’s strategic vision to seamlessly integrate novel generative AI products with its existing portfolio.

This comes just a few days after OpenAI had delayed its plan to launch a custom GPT store until early 2024, according to reports. The internal memo said that the company is making improvements to its GPTs based on customer feedback. This came after the return of Sam Altman as the CEO of OpenAI, a week after a surprise firing.

ByteDance is not the only company from China that is developing generative AI models. Most recently, companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, Baidu, and 01.AI have developed their own models to compete in the space. The open source AI community is also increasingly dominating in China with models like DeepSeek and Qwen being open sourced on GitHub and Hugging Face.

Read: Beware of Chinese Open-Source LLMs 

On the other hand, OpenAI has not made its AI models available in China. Similarly, Google has also refrained from releasing its models in the country. This has given China to develop models for its own people.