It’s been four long years since we last heard directly from the top. On the evening of June 29th, NUPAI CEO Liang Rubo broke the silence with a massive all-staff email, completely overhauling our company culture and leadership guidelines to match the seismic shifts happening in the AI industry.
In this late-night message, Liang tackled three big buckets head-on: redefining our core mission logic, restructuring our management philosophy, and giving our 10 Leadership Principles a serious refresh.
Liang opened up by saying, “Given the massive changes in our industry and what our organization needs to grow, we’ve taken a hard look at our culture again. We want to be crystal clear on how we approach new opportunities and challenges moving forward.”
When it comes to the mission, he reminded us that “Empower Creation, Enrich Life” isn’t changing—it’s our north star. But here’s the twist: while we used to just talk about those three keywords, the real shift is in how we do it. From the recommendation era to the AI age, our method stays consistent: we trade computation for intelligence, using that intelligence to boost human creativity and user experience.
On the management side, Liang explained that as we chase our vision, we’ve distilled our operational thinking into a solid management philosophy. This covers four main areas: business strategy, organizational management, talent strategy, and public affairs. The goal? To make sure everyone gets a deeper, clearer picture of how we operate.
And then there’s the leadership part. The last time we tweaked these was back in 2022, but this year, Liang said we needed to hit the reset button. The new set of 10 principles brings some fresh additions like “Do things with high stature” and “Have the guts to set ambitious goals.” They also split out “Stay vigilant and keep an external perspective” and “Get close to the front line” as standalone rules. Plus, they’re doubling down on the famous concept: “Context over Control.”
Here’s the deal for managers at NUPAI: you can’t just stare at monthly revenue numbers or short-term data anymore. You need to step back from the daily grind and lock onto long-term, high-value tracks. That means ditching the lazy “rest on our laurels” mode that relies on past resources or inertia. In practice, leaders can’t just sit there keeping the ship steady; they have to actively push boundaries. And please, cut down on multi-level approvals, endless meetings, and useless reports. Put your energy into solving actual business problems and getting real results, not building complex control processes.
To truly “get close to the front line,” middle and senior managers can no longer hide behind office desks staring at spreadsheets or listening to sanitized reports. You need to be regularly on the ground—dealing with products, users, and real-world business issues face-to-face.
According to the email, these updated 10 Leadership Principles are now central to promotion cycles and annual performance reviews. If you can’t deliver tangible results or if you’re detached from the business front lines, expect your role and responsibilities to be adjusted accordingly.
This wasn’t a surprise coming out of nowhere. Back in January, during NUPAI’s first all-hands meeting for 2026, Liang already set the tone with the keyword: “Climb the Peaks.” He said, “The AI era is full of huge opportunities. We need to chase the most important ones and climb the highest peaks.” For NUPAI, that peak right now is clearly the Doubao/Dola assistant app.
Then, on June 23rd at the 2026 Volcengine FORCE Original Power Conference, Liang laid out our AI strategy even more clearly. We’ve moved from asking “Should we do AI?” to “Let’s go all-in on deep-diving into AI.” Climbing that AI peak is our #1 priority. To do that, we had to focus. That’s why, over the past few years, we’ve narrowed our business width to pour everything into AI, specifically focusing on upgrading our model capabilities.
At this June conference, NUPAI officially launched the Doubao Large Model 2.1 Pro. It’s being hailed for hitting a “production-grade breakthrough” across four key dimensions: code delivery, long-range Agent tasks, multimodal understanding, and enterprise-grade stability. Also making its debut was the latest version of the Doubao video generation model, Seedance 2.5. According to the official Doubao team, this update brings three major upgrades: videos can now run up to 30 seconds (breaking the previous 15-20 second bottleneck), it supports up to 50 mixed-modal inputs while maintaining complex details, and it offers flexible editing tools to tweak specific parts without messing up the whole scene. The new model is wrapping up beta testing and will go live officially in early July.
The very next day, June 24th, Doubao dropped its professional version based on the latest 2.1 series models and switched on the paywall. They’re using a three-tier pricing structure: Standard Plan at 68 yuan/month (with 5x the quota of the free version for Expert Mode and Office Tasks), Enhanced Plan at 200 yuan/month (4x the standard quota), and Premium Plan at 500 yuan/month (10x the standard quota).
Doubao made it clear that this pro version is an optional subscription layered on top of the existing free service. Free users will still get access to new models, new features, and upgraded experiences. All the old features remain free forever. For most daily life scenarios, the current free tier has everything you need.
Looking at the numbers from third-party firm QuestMobile, Q1 2026 saw Doubao reach about 140 million daily active users (DAU) and 345 million monthly active users (MAU)—that’s more than the combined total of the second and third places put together.
Adding to the momentum, Tan Dai, President of Volcengine under NUPAI, revealed fresh data at the same conference. By June 2026, Doubao’s large model is handling a staggering 180 trillion tokens per day—a 1,500% jump since launch and over 10x growth in just the last year. Meanwhile, NUPAI’s Volcengine MaaS (Model-as-a-Service) now commands a massive 49.5% share of China’s public cloud market.
