Zhang Yiming: ByteDance will not be able to compete with OpenAI until 2029

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming recently provided a timeline at the all-hands meeting of the Seed team, stating that ByteDance is not expected to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic in the cutting-edge AI field until 2029 to 2030 at the earliest. Zhang Yiming pointed out that the pre-training dataset used by the Seed large language model is several orders of magnitude smaller than that of top competitors. Doubao is the largest AI chat application in terms of user scale in the country, and the video generation model Seedance has also entered the ranks of the world's top models.

When Seed 2.1 was released in June this year, the team admitted that the model still has significant shortcomings in high-difficulty open tasks and cutting-edge scientific research problems. In May this year, the company discussed raising its annual capital expenditure to a maximum of $70 billion, mainly for building AI data centers and other infrastructure. In August, it was reported that Seed is pre-training a large model with up to 100 trillion parameters, surpassing all publicly available large models in the country.

Seed currently has about 1,000 R&D personnel, led by Wu Yonghui, who was recruited by Zhang Yiming from Google DeepMind last year. ByteDance has also launched a virtual stock "Doubao Stock" linked to the Doubao business. ByteDance plans to launch a personal AI assistant similar to Meta Muse in the coming weeks, allowing users to interact with AI through voice and virtual avatars and have it complete tasks on their behalf. The personal assistant project, internally codenamed Spell, began internal testing in April but was not officially launched due to the release of the Doubao phone and other reasons. It is now planned to be further integrated with Doubao.