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

By Simon Yoon

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/55305
Published: 2026-11-12T11:32:00.000Z
Updated: 2026-11-12T11:32:00.000Z
Section: Technology

> Zhang Yiming said Seed's pretraining corpus trails top rivals by several orders of magnitude. The team acknowledged performance gaps when it released Seed2.1 in June.

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.