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ByteDance is preparing to enter the personal AI assistant race with a new agent modelled on Meta's Muse. The launch is expected in the coming weeks, as the TikTok owner looks to strengthen its position in artificial intelligence and catch up with leading US companies.
The plan was discussed by co-founder Zhang Yiming during a recent meeting with ByteDance’s AI team, according to people familiar with the matter. Zhang believes the company can eventually compete with OpenAI and Anthropic. However, he reportedly told staff that reaching the industry's top level could take until 2029 or 2030.
ByteDance has not shared details about the assistant's features or confirmed whether it will have dedicated hardware.
Zhang identified training data as a major concern. ByteDance's Seed large language models are trained on datasets much smaller than those used by leading competitors, according to people familiar with the meeting.
He also told the team not to depend on model distillation, a method that trains smaller systems using outputs from larger AI models. Instead, he wants ByteDance to develop its own technology.
The company's last major language model update, Seed 2.1, arrived in June. Its Seed unit has yet to release a model that ranks among the top performers on global benchmarks, Bloomberg reported.
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ByteDance has made stronger progress in video generation through its Seedance models. The company has used its large video library to build a competitive product and is reportedly prepared to invest as much as USD 70 billion in AI development and infrastructure.
Its Seed team has around 1,000 researchers and engineers, led by Wu Yonghui, who joined from Google DeepMind in 2025. The group is also working on image generation, robotics and virtual reality.