LLM aside (which is just GPT-4o and Claude 3.5), I imagine that the GUI for the IDE may have better Chinese support in some way.

Although I haven't tried to find a Chinese mode myself.

That it's targeted at Chinese abroad is just what I saw from Googling it and reading the SCMP (Singapore) article on it.

The company that made it is also from Singapore (even if it's under Bytedance's umbrella).

They seem to be separate from TikTok. The only thing they have in the app store for example, is some chatbot application.

Not really, there' a world of difference between how every model I've tried¹ handles English vs my own native language². It's especially noticeable with smaller models, which produce coherent English, but completely break down in other languages: spewing out incorrect grammar, mixing words from other languages where they make zero sense, etc.

¹: which is dozens of them at this point, open and not.

²: with lots of speakers and training data.

Would finetuning fix this? If they are statstical parrots it would seem like it wouldn't

Probably tough to fix small models with fine-tuning... You'd likely need to train them with enough data from languages (and maybe translations between them) that they need to support, so that they can connect ideas in different languages properly.

Separately, the fact that they can translate between languages where they have never seen any translation data in their inputs shows that they have internal models of the world and language, that go beyond what one might expect from a statistical parrot.

They do have world understanding - perhaps limited some by the fact that their input data may not cover a lot of everyday things.