AI TRENDS | Zhang Yiming Says ByteDance May Not Catch Up With Anthropic and OpenAI Until 2029

ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming said the company can compete with Anthropic and OpenAI in frontier AI, but may need until 2029 or 2030 to reach their level. According to PANews, citing Bloomberg, Zhang made the remarks at a recent company-wide meeting for ByteDance’s AI team. Zhang said the pretraining datasets for ByteDance’s Seed large language models are several orders of magnitude smaller than those used by leading U.S. competitors. He also said ByteDance should not rely too heavily on model distillation and should focus on long-term development. A previous report said ByteDance was expanding into AI agents and planned to launch an assistant similar to Meta Muse.