According to ChainCatcher, Bytedance founder Zhang Yiming said recently during a Seed team meeting that the company will need until 2029 or 2030 at the earliest to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic in frontier AI. Zhang noted that Seed's pre-training dataset is several orders of magnitude smaller than leading competitors.
Bytedance is training a large language model with up to 10 trillion parameters, exceeding all publicly disclosed models in China. The Seed team, led by Wu Yonghui (recruited from Google DeepMind last year), has approximately 1,000 researchers. In May, the company discussed raising annual capital expenditure to as high as 7 billion U.S. dollars, primarily for AI data center infrastructure.