ByteDance plans to launch an AI assistant modelled on Meta’s Muse in the coming weeks.
Bloomberg’s report, relayed by The Next Web, says the plan came out of an all-hands meeting of ByteDance’s AI team. Co-founder Zhang Yiming set out the timeline there. The agent is meant to build on ByteDance’s lead in AI video.
Muse, which Meta introduced in September, is a voice-based agent with an animated avatar. Meta runs it on its smart glasses and is preparing a dedicated gadget, the Muse Charm, a keychain device due in December. A ByteDance version would be a Chinese entry into that market.
Bloomberg says Zhang believes ByteDance can compete with Anthropic and OpenAI at the cutting edge, but not before 2029 or 2030. He also argues the company shouldn’t lean on distillation, which means training on a bigger model’s outputs. His bigger worry is data: Seed’s language models are pre-trained on datasets orders of magnitude smaller than those of frontier rivals, he reportedly told staff.
ByteDance’s chatbot Doubao is China’s most popular ChatGPT-style bot. Yet Seed, the company’s AI model unit, hasn’t released a model that touches the top of global benchmarks, and it hasn’t opened its weights to developers. The Next Web says Seed 2.1, its last major update, arrived in June.
Seedance, its video model, turned the company’s vast video library into a monetised platform, filling the gap OpenAI left when it shut down Sora. ByteDance is also reportedly prepared to spend as much as $70 billion on AI infrastructure.
The reporting doesn’t say what the assistant will do, or whether it will reach users outside China. It’s unclear whether ByteDance will build its own hardware. A ByteDance spokesperson didn’t respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment.
Meta’s Muse Charm isn’t due until December.
