On 11 November, Bloomberg reported on an internal meeting of the AI team at ByteDance, which owns TikTok. The report relies on anonymous sources because the meeting was private. ByteDance did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment. The Japan Times also published the Bloomberg story.

Co-founder Zhang Yiming said ByteDance could compete with Anthropic and OpenAI at the cutting edge, the sources said. He cautioned, however, that it would take until at least 2029 or 2030. Zhang now spends much of his time shaping ByteDance’s AI strategy behind the scenes.

ByteDance plans to release an AI agent, a program that handles tasks for the user with the help of a language model, in the coming weeks. The agent resembles Muse, which Meta unveiled in September. Muse is a voice-controlled assistant with an animated character. Meta offers it in its smart glasses and in the upcoming Muse Charm device. ByteDance hopes the agent will help it close the gap with the top US labs in as little as three years, Bloomberg reported.

The agent’s name and features have not been disclosed, and it is not known whether it will have its own device. Heise online reported that the agent is meant to handle everyday tasks such as emails and online orders. Bloomberg’s report does not mention this.

Zhang says training data is orders of magnitude smaller than rivals’

Zhang’s biggest concern is training data, the sources said. He said ByteDance’s Seed unit pre-trains its large language models on datasets that are orders of magnitude smaller than those used by frontier rivals. In pre-training, a model learns language from a large body of text before fine-tuning.

Zhang also reiterated his view that the company should not rely on distillation, that is, training its own model on the outputs of another, larger model. White House officials and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei have criticised Alibaba, Moonshot AI and Z.ai, among others, for distilling US models, Bloomberg reported.

Seed is the only major Chinese AI player that has released neither a language model reaching the top of global benchmarks nor an open-weight model, Bloomberg said. Its latest major update, Seed 2.1, came out in June. Even so, the company’s Doubao is China’s most popular ChatGPT-style chatbot. Seed, a unit of about 1,000 researchers and engineers, is led by Wu Yonghui, whom Zhang lured from Google DeepMind in 2025.

ByteDance already leads in video AI

Video generation is the only area of AI in which ByteDance is clearly ahead, Bloomberg reported. The company has trained its Seedance models on its extensive video data and makes money from them. The models have filled the gap OpenAI left when it shut down its Sora service.

Central to Zhang’s ambitions is a plan to spend as much as $70 billion and build Seedance into China’s leading video AI platform, Bloomberg wrote. The Next Web describes the sum as money earmarked for AI infrastructure.