TikTok is hoping Tako will be used as a means to facilitate content to the viewer. It can provide recommendations based on specific requests, such as “Show me cat videos,” as well as a user’s viewing history, according to Watchful. Having access to the user’s history could give Tako a leg up over other AI bots given the strength of TikTok’s algorithm.
That said, Tako is not built on any in-house AI technology but rather an undisclosed third-party provider. This means that, while TikTok has customized the underlying model, it does not own it like OpenAI owns ChatGPT. It is unclear how this will impact TikTok’s ability to improve Tako by continuing to train it on new data.
