Bytedance's Zhang Yiming Prioritizes Long-Term Goals Over Shortcuts in Large Model Development

According to Beating Monitor, Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, explicitly stated last month at a full-team meeting of the Seed team that the company will not treat distillation as a shortcut to catching up with large models, even if it means temporarily falling behind domestic competitors. He urged the team to be willing to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term objectives. Distillation involves training a smaller model to replicate the outputs of a stronger model, thereby saving training time and computational resources. Internally, ByteDance acknowledges that avoiding this path may make it harder for Seed’s language models to catch up in the short term with domestic peers such as DeepSeek, Kimi, and Qwen. However, ByteDance is more concerned about political risks. The company has long faced scrutiny from the U.S. government over TikTok. Although TikTok’s U.S. data security operations have now incorporated U.S. capital, ByteDance still holds shares and continues to manage TikTok’s global commercial business. If accused of extensively extracting capabilities from leading U.S. models, Washington might renew pressure on TikTok. Previously, Anthropic accused DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Zhipu, and Alibaba of extensively extracting capabilities from Claude—but did not name ByteDance.