China’s billion-dollar, AI-driven, mobile-first news operation

By Scott M. Scher, Columbia University

Bytedance, created in 2012 and is the first AI driven media lab, Toutiao- high quality content creation. They are the largest

AI platform in China., according to Zhiyi Liu of Bytedance. Their platform creates enhanced exposure for its content producers. The platform technology evaluates content trends. A unique feature of their recommendation system is to inject random content into a users feed in order to gage interests. They have had so much success with AI recommendations that they had to add an anti-addiction feature to their platform, which notifies a user if they have spent too much time on the system.

Bytedance garners 300 million DAU at home and abroad, more than 20 million videos uploaded every day, and 10 billion page views of our video. Bytedance focuses on big data, visualization, openness, but not on recommendations alone. Using the media lab they are able to determine hot news, keywords, research reports, readers preference, and ranking of influence of the media. This allows for enhanced target marketing and advertising responses.

Using their Gradient Boosting Decision Tree algorithm they have been able to combat against fake news through matching keywords against a rumor database.