In early September 2026, OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang quickly stating that "AGI has arrived." At the same time, OpenAI's chief scientist published a long article warning that the chain-of-thought window for AI is closing.
While the global debate focuses on how powerful models can get, China's AI industry is shifting focus from "training models" to "using models." The shift is measured by whether AI has entered real workflows and become an everyday work necessity.
Data shows that as of June 2026, ByteDance's Doubao model's daily token usage exceeded 18 trillion, up more than 10 times year on year. Volcano Engine ranked first in China's public cloud MaaS market for two consecutive years with a 49.5 percent share, serving more than 200 "Trillion Tokens Club" members.
In coding, Doubao 2.1 Pro has moved beyond code completion to repository-level understanding and end-to-end delivery, running for 18 hours on chip design RTL tasks and generating 1,300 lines of production-ready code. In video generation, Seedance 2.0's usage curve has flipped, with weekday enterprise usage now exceeding weekend personal usage.
Source: Guangming Daily / Toutiao
