ByteDance May Not Compete With OpenAI and Anthropic in Frontier AI Before 2029–2030

ByteDance may not be ready to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic in frontier AI until 2029 or 2030 at the earliest, Zhang Yiming told employees at a recent meeting of the company's Seed team.

Zhang said the pretraining corpus used for Seed's large language models trails top competitors' datasets by several orders of magnitude. Doubao has China's largest user base among AI chat apps, and Seedance ranks among the leading video-generation systems worldwide, but general-purpose language models remain a weak point.

At Seed2.1's June release, the team acknowledged that the model struggled with complex open-ended tasks and frontier research questions.