Zhang Yiming: ByteDance Can Compete With Anthropic and OpenAI, but Catching Up Won't Happen Until 2029 at the Earliest

November 12 — According to Bloomberg, ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming said at a recent all-hands meeting for the AI team that ByteDance is capable of competing with industry leaders such as Anthropic and OpenAI at the AI frontier. However, he also cautioned the team that truly reaching the level of these companies will take at least until 2029 or 2030.

At the meeting, Zhang Yiming said that the pre-training dataset scale of ByteDance's Seed series of large language models is several orders of magnitude smaller than the datasets used by top U.S. competitors. Zhang Yiming also reiterated that ByteDance should not overly rely on model distillation technology and should instead focus on long-term development.

Previously, reports said ByteDance is pushing into the agent track and plans to launch an AI assistant similar to Meta Muse.