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Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
@RnaudBertrand
Jan 28 • 1 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
This blew my mind: in terms of actual usage, Bytedance is now by far the world's largest AI company.

According to Tan Dai (the President of Volcano Engine, Bytedance's equivalent of AWS), they now process over 50 trillion tokens a day. Source: finance.sina.com.cn/cj/2025-12-19/… (and confirmed in multiple other sources like 36kr.com/p/360232354034…)

As far as I can see, this is more than any US tech company.

Google, for instance, processes just 43 trillion tokens a day across all its services (pymnts.com/artificial-int…)

Microsoft, on its end, according to Satya Nadella during his Q3 2025 earnings, processes 50 trillion tokens a... month! So roughly 30 times less than Bytedance (interconnects.ai/p/people-use-a…).

As for OpenAI, its entire API - according to Andreessen Horowitz (a16z.com/state-of-ai/) - averaged about 8.6 trillion tokens per day in October.

Bytedance's enormous AI usage is driven by the fact that Doubao, its consumer-facing AI, is now by far the most used AI in China. Its API is also huge: apparently they have over 100 customers that have each used trillions of tokens (zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/198507884785…).

Something to keep in mind next time you read about America "winning" the AI race.

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More from @RnaudBertrand

Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
Apr 24
Wow, this is huge, after months of speculation and the U.S. running a massive pre-emptive discreditation campaign (x.com/RnaudBertrand/…), DeepSeek-V4 is finally out!

I haven't studied it in depth but here are the most striking aspects as far as I can tell:

- Fully open sourced with open weights (available for download on huggingface: huggingface.co/deepseek-ai)

- Zero CUDA dependency anywhere in its stack, which is probably the biggest deal of all. For those who don't know, CUDA is Nvidia's software layer - the foundation nearly every frontier AI model in the world is built on. Except, as of today, DeepSeek V4, which can run entirely on Huawei Ascend chips via Huawei's CANN framework (finance.yahoo.com/sectors/techno…). Very concretely it means that China now not only has its own frontier AI models, but its own domestic AI stack, top to bottom.

- The prices are insanely low. V4-Pro is roughly 3x cheaper than GPT-5.5 on input and 8.6x cheaper on output. And V4-Flash is an order of magnitude cheaper still, at $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens vs OpenAI's $5/$30 - so 30-100x cheaper than GPT-5.5 (!). And remember, these are the prices DeepSeek charges on its own API - anyone can download the weights and run them for "free" on their own server.

- It is at or near the frontier on most benchmarks that matter. V4-Pro-Max matches or beats GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6 on competitive programming (Codeforces rating 3206), coding (LiveCodeBench 93.5), and math (HMMT 95.2, IMO AnswerBench 89.8). It trails the very newest GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7 on a handful of the hardest agentic and knowledge benchmarks, but it's in the same league.

In effect the value proposition is: "Same league as frontier US AI, at a fraction of the price, open-source and freely modifiable, and hardware-agnostic - you can run it on whatever infrastructure you choose."

Which is insanely good. I now understand the need for a preemptive discreditation campaign: they had every reason to be worried. For the vast majority of use cases, you'd have to be a literal idiot to keep paying OpenAI or Anthropic's prices when this exists.
👇
This 👇 is indeed interesting. It means:
a) V4-Pro is genuinely being served on Huawei chips (since limited by Huawei 950 supernode availability)
b) they expect far bigger compute scale in H2 2026, and that API prices will drop significantly further
Read 8 tweets
Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
Apr 11
Wow, that's extremely rare for a U.S. treaty ally.

South Korea's president, addressing Israel: "It’s disappointing that you don’t even once reflect on the criticisms from people around the world who are suffering and struggling due to your relentless anti-human rights and anti-international law actions."

He said this after posting this yesterday (x.com/Jaemyung_Lee/s…), a video of IDF soldiers throwing a young Palestinian off a rooftop and commenting that "there is no difference between this and the Japanese wartime sexual slavery issue we raise, the massacre of Jews, or wartime killings."

Israel's Foreign Ministry responded that his post was "unacceptable" but President Lee obviously - and courageously - chose to double down 👇

Also probably says a lot about where U.S.-South Korea relations are at right now.
He's backed by other senior South Korean political figures, like Choo Mi-ae (the first female leader of South Korea's Democratic Party) 👇
Or Park Hong-geun, Minister of Planning and Budget, who calls on Israel to "break free from the chain of victimhood becoming perpetration" 👇
Read 4 tweets
Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
Apr 6
So, if I got that right, here's the narrative:

- A US F-15E fighter jet got shot down over Iran, despite Trump saying 2 days beforehand in his nationwide address that Iran has "no anti-aircraft equipment. Their radar is 100% annihilated." (apnews.com/article/donald…)

- The plane's weapons systems officer - a "highly respected Colonel," according to Trump - ejected from the plane and got "seriously wounded" (still according to Trump: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTru…)

- He still managed to "hike up a 7,000-foot [2.1km] mountain ridgeline and hide in a crevice" in the Zagros Mountains, despite his wounds (time.com/article/2026/0…)

- U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones started killing all "Iranian military-aged males believed to be a threat who got within three kilometers of [the American's location]" (x.com/ByChrisGordon/…)

- To retrieve him the U.S. managed to seize an "abandoned airport," 200 miles deep inside Iran, near Isfahan (bbc.com/news/articles/…), which happens to be where Iran's largest atomic scientific center is located (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isfahan_N…)

- They landed two MC-130 military transport planes in that airport (theaviationist.com/2026/04/05/u-s…) in an operation involving "hundreds of special forces troops and military personnel" (time.com/article/2026/0…)

- Both MC-130 planes got "stuck in the sand" and the U.S. destroyed them themselves "to prevent them from falling into Iranian hands" (theaviationist.com/2026/04/05/u-s…)

- They deployed "three new aircraft to extract all the U.S. personnel" on the ground (theaviationist.com/2026/04/05/u-s…)

- There are videos circulating online of "heavy clashes" with presumably Iranian missiles raining down in Kohgiluyeh County, in the Zagros Mountains during that night (x.com/Afshin_Ismaeli…)

- Iran sent pictures of the aftermath at the "abandoned airport" and it's a sight of utter destruction, with US plane and MH-6 helicopter parts scattered all over the ground, still smoking (turkiyetoday.com/region/wreckag…). Iran claims they are the ones who in fact destroyed all the aircraft.

- Meanwhile a second U.S. plane, an A-10 Warthog, also crashed on Friday near the Strait of Hormuz according to two U.S. officials speaking to the NYT (nytimes.com/live/2026/04/0…). In that instance too the lone pilot was apparently "safely rescued."

- In all this, after the multiple planes and helicopters destroyed or shot down, the documented heavy clashes, the "hundreds of special forces troops and military personnel" operating deep inside Iran, not a single US soldier was reported killed "or even wounded" (according to Trump: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTru…).

- And the 'highly respected Colonel' this was all for? No name. No photo. No interview. Nobody has spoken to him nor knows who he is.

So to sum up: anti-aircraft equipment that supposedly didn't exist shot down an F-15 (and, apparently, an A-10 Warthog the same day). A seriously wounded man climbed a 2.1km mountain. The US seized an airfield 200 miles inside a country it's at war with, next to one of its most strategic nuclear sites, and deployed hundreds of troops all apparently unimpeded. Lost two planes to "sand" and destroyed their own helicopters. Videos show heavy clashes, missiles raining down - but not a single person got "even wounded". And the man at the center of it all? Nobody knows who he is, completely anonymous, zero pictures, but Trump says he is "SAFE and SOUND." And so is the rescued A-10 Warthog pilot, who also remains anonymous.

Trump concludes this all proves the US has "achieved overwhelming Air Dominance and Superiority over the Iranian skies" (truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTru…), despite the whole episode only happening because Iran shot his planes out of the sky.

Basically, the only thing that's "overwhelming" here is the audacity of the storytelling...
The planes that got "stuck in sand"
Iran's count is that the US lost 12 aircraft in the rescue operation (on top of course of the downed F-15 and A-10 Warthog) 👇

Which, if accurate, would be a disaster of unprecedented proportions.
x.com/upholdreality/…

Heck, even the count semi-officially acknowledged by the US (5-6 aircraft destroyed: 2 MC-130Js, 1-2 Little Birds, F-15E, A-10) is remarkably disastrous for what's being sold as a triumph.
Read 5 tweets
Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
Mar 23
The ultimate proof that Iran has, in fact, escalation dominance here.

Iran already said "there has been no direct or indirect contact" with Trump (). He basically chickened out after Iran's threats on desalination.

Incredibly, Iran took on the US symmetrically and won.iranintl.com/en/liveblog/20…
By the way, the fact that everyone's first instinct, including in the US, is to automatically assume Trump is lying and to wait for Iran's statement to understand what's going on is immensely telling in and of itself.
Trump is now speaking about sharing power with the Ayatollah 😅
Read 6 tweets
Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
Mar 19
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but if infrastructure like this 👇 gets blown up, as of this moment it will take at least a decade to recover from this war - and the truth is that the world's energy picture is probably changed forever.

This single facility 👇produced roughly 20% of global LNG supply (aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/18…) and, as of 2011, had taken $70 billion to build (energyintel.com/0000017b-a7be-…).

What makes this even worse is that Iran's strike on this was retaliation after Israel attacked their South Pars gas field which draws from the same natural gas reservoir, which is the world's largest by far (9,700 km² - about the size of Qatar itself).

Heck, on the list of the 25 largest natural gas fields (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_n…) this single reservoir holds roughly 40% of their combined recoverable reserves - and is nearly 6 times bigger than the 2nd biggest field in the world. And, unlike many of the others on the list, it's only at 10% depletion (meaning 90% of the gas is still there).

Which means that, probably for many years, a huge share of the gas from the world's largest reservoir simply won't be extractable, as infrastructure on both sides - Qatar's and Iran's - has now been blown up.

From a global energy supply perspective, we're deep into worst-case scenario territory.
Even Trump realizes just how catastrophically bad this is 👇.

He fails to mention it's entirely caused by himself, though. A totally avoidable war he started.
The Israelis' reply: "Trump knew, we're joined at the hip in this" 👇
Read 8 tweets
Arnaud Bertrand Profile picture
Mar 4
I don't know if people understand just how insanely egregious this is.

First of all, 1) not only are NATO spending targets NOT legally binding (nothing in any NATO-related legal text mandates a specific GDP-based threshold for defense spending), but on top of this 2) Spain requested AND RECEIVED an exemption from the 5% target at the 2025 Hague Summit - NATO changed the declaration's language specifically to allow Spain to sign while publicly declaring it would not comply (jurist.org/news/2025/06/n…)

This means that, legally speaking and according to NATO's own rules, Spain is doubly within its rights: there is no binding obligation to begin with, and Spain was excused from even this non-binding obligation.

That's the first point: Germany's chancellor just endorsed - from the Oval Office - the U.S. punishing a fellow EU nation for refusing to comply with an obligation that doesn't exist in law, under a political pledge Spain was excused from at a NATO summit.

The second point is that this 5% target has nothing to do with "defense", quite the contrary in fact: it is pretty explicitly an imperial tribute to the U.S. that will actually **weaken** European defense.

That was Spain's main argument for refusing to comply: Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that "committing to 5% would not make us any safer" because it "would only reinforce our dependence" on the U.S. (tiempoar.com.ar/ta_article/ped…)

That's the insane thing about EU defense spending: in recent years, the more it has spent on defense, the more that spending has flowed to American contractors as opposed to European ones, making the EU defense industry weaker (x.com/adam_tooze/sta…). Increasing spending to 5% doesn't strengthen European defense: it accelerates exactly this transfer.

All the more insane given the well-documented production backlogs in the U.S. defense industry and its inability to produce at scale: US defense analysts - including from Trump-adjacent think tanks like AEI (aei.org/research-produ…) - openly acknowledge that European customers would be deprioritized behind U.S. ones in any real conflict.

AND, critically, a defense industry from a country that's increasingly hostile to Europe - explicitly so in its National Security Strategy - and whose weaponry has "kill switches" that allows for remote disabling.

I mean, the sheer madness of it: anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that DOUBLING your defense spending to enrich a foreign arms industry that has kill switches on your weapons, can't meet its own military's needs, and increasingly treats you as an adversary, is not even remotely a defense strategy - it's suicide.

That's why having Merz - in the oval office, sitting next to Trump - endorse economic coercion against the one EU country that's still sane enough to see through this madness is so egregious, and frankly straight-up traitorous.

For those who know Asterix and Obelix, Spain is the "one small village still holding out against the invaders" and Merz is Cassius Ceramix, the self-described "gallo-roman" Gaul village chief who's the incarnation of all sycophants after his tribe were conquered by the Romans.

I'm with Asterix, and all Europeans should be too.
The "one small village still holding out against the invaders"
😅
Read 4 tweets

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