Doubao's Deep Thinking vs. DeepSeek: Which One Is Better? 149

While other companies have already launched deep thinking reasoning models, ByteDance has been silent with no news at all. In reality, ByteDance has been conducting internal testing and has already gone through a considerable period of beta testing, all while maintaining a low-profile stance.

However, today there is finally new progress—the "Deep Thinking" mode of Doubao has officially launched. Let's compare it with DeepSeek to see what the differences are and which one is better.

How Search and Thinking Are Combined

• DeepSeek: Handles deep thinking and search separately, requiring users to manually choose whether to enable thinking and web search. For example, when a user asks something, it will first search the web for all relevant information, and then generate a response based on that information and the question.

• Doubao Deep Thinking: Integrates thinking and search together—it thinks first, then searches, and continuously thinks and adjusts its search direction during the search process. For example, for a question like "The roles of actors from 'The Legend of Magpie Sword Gate 2' in 'Rural Love'," Doubao will first break the question down into multiple steps, thinking and searching progressively, rather than searching for everything in one go.

Question Handling Logic

• DeepSeek: When handling complex questions, it may directly search for a large amount of information before giving an answer, but this approach can lead to less accurate results, especially when multiple pieces of related information are involved.

• Doubao Deep Thinking: Adopts an Agent-like logic—it first plans and thinks through the question, clarifies the sub-questions that need to be solved, and then conducts step-by-step search and verification. For example, when answering detailed questions about the "Harry Potter" film series, Doubao will perform multiple rounds of search to progressively refine the answer.

Search Process and Quality

• DeepSeek: The search process is relatively one-dimensional, and may produce incomplete or inaccurate information on complex questions. For example, when answering questions about actors in "The Legend of Magpie Sword Gate 2," the answer provided by DeepSeek was missing quite a bit of information about the main characters.

• Doubao Deep Thinking: Through multiple rounds of search and thinking, it progressively refines the answer, resulting in relatively higher quality and accuracy. In tests, Doubao's answer accuracy rate reached around 80%, and it performed better on some complex questions.

Performance and Cost

• DeepSeek: Performance and cost are not explicitly mentioned, but based on its search approach, it may be less efficient when handling complex questions.

• Doubao Deep Thinking: Offers high cost-effectiveness, is fast, and is free with unlimited usage. Most questions receive an answer within around 20 seconds, with a maximum of 50 seconds. By comparison, Openai's DeepResearch produces high-quality output, but takes a long time and is costly.

User Experience

• DeepSeek: Users need to manually choose whether to enable web search and thinking, making the operation relatively complex.

• Doubao Deep Thinking: Users only need to ask a question, and Doubao automatically performs thinking and searching. The operation is simpler and the results better match user expectations.

Overall, Doubao's Deep Thinking feature provides deeper and more accurate answers by combining reasoning with search, while DeepSeek places more emphasis on search and user-driven choices. Another point is that Doubao simply feels faster.