Credit: Tang Yan Song / Shutterstock ByteDance plans to release an AI assistant similar to Meta’s Muse in the coming weeks, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with a recent all-hands meeting of the company’s AI team. At that meeting, co-founder Zhang Yiming laid out a sober timeline. He believes ByteDance can compete with Anthropic and OpenAI at the cutting edge, the people told Bloomberg, but not before 2029 or 2030. The template is a hit product.
Muse, which Meta introduced in September, bundles the company’s AI research into a voice-based agent with an animated avatar, distributed across its smart glasses and an upcoming dedicated gadget, the Muse Charm. Whether ByteDance plans hardware of its own is unclear, per Bloomberg. Zhang’s bigger worry is data. The TikTok owner’s Seed language models are pre-trained on datasets orders of magnitude smaller than those of frontier rivals, he reportedly told staff.
He also repeated that ByteDance should not lean on distillation, the practice of training on a bigger model’s outputs, which has drawn criticism of Chinese labs such as Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and Z.ai from White House officials and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. The stance leaves ByteDance playing a long game from an odd position. It built Doubao, China’s most popular ChatGPT-style bot, yet Seed remains the only major Chinese contender that has neither released a model touching the top of global benchmarks nor opened its weights to developers. Its last major update, Seed 2.1, arrived in June.
Where ByteDance does lead is video. Its Seedance models turned the company’s vast video trove into a top-tier, monetised generation platform, filling the gap OpenAI left when it shuttered Sora, and the company is reportedly prepared to spend as much as $70B on AI infrastructure to press that advantage. The Seed unit itself numbers roughly 1,000 researchers and engineers under Wu Yonghui, whom Zhang poached from Google DeepMind in 2025, and enjoys preferential equity packages. In October, it became the first major Chinese lab to stand up a dedicated safety and alignment team, a notable move as Western rivals sign safety pledges of their own.
A ByteDance spokesperson did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment. If the timeline holds, though, the agent wars that OpenAI is fighting with business agents and Meta with avatars are about to get their biggest Chinese entrant yet. Get the TNW newsletter ✕ Close Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
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