On November 12, multiple sources familiar with the matter revealed that ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming recently addressed the company's AI business once again at an all-hands meeting for the AI team. He stated that ByteDance is capable of competing with OpenAI and Anthropic, but that truly catching up to frontier technology will not happen until 2029 or 2030 at the earliest, and that its large models need to benchmark against the international first tier. Zhang Yiming candidly acknowledged that, compared with top overseas AI companies, the pre-training dataset scale of ByteDance's Seed series models remains relatively small—an issue that currently demands the most attention.
