ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming told an all-hands meeting of the company’s Seed team last month that the company will not treat model distillation as a shortcut to catch up in large language models, even if that leaves it temporarily behind domestic rivals. He asked the team to accept short-term sacrifice in pursuit of longer-term goals. Distillation, which trains a new model on the outputs of a stronger one, can reduce training time and computing costs. Inside ByteDance, the view is that this choice will make it harder for Seed’s language model to close the gap in the near term with Chinese peers including DeepSeek, Kimi and Qwen. The company is also said to be more concerned about political risk. Given TikTok’s long-running scrutiny from the U.S. government, any accusation that ByteDance had extracted capabilities at scale from leading U.S. frontier models could bring renewed pressure from Washington. The report also noted that Anthropic had previously accused DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Zhipu and Alibaba of extracting capabilities from Claude at scale, though it did not name ByteDance.
ChainCatcher reported that ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming told an all-hands meeting of the Seed team last month that the company would not use model distillation as a shortcut to catch up in the large-model race, even if that meant falling temporarily behind domestic competitors.
He said the team should be willing to give up short-term gains in exchange for long-term goals.
How ByteDance views distillation
Distillation refers to training a new model on the outputs of a stronger one, a method that can save training time and computing resources. Inside ByteDance, the view is that this decision will make it harder for Seed’s language model to catch up in the near term with domestic peers such as DeepSeek, Kimi and Qwen.
Political risk is a bigger concern
The report said ByteDance is more concerned about political risk. The company has faced long-term scrutiny from the U.S. government over TikTok, and any accusation that it had extracted capabilities at scale from leading U.S. frontier models could trigger fresh pressure from Washington on TikTok.
Prior accusations cited in the report
Anthropic had previously accused DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Zhipu and Alibaba of extracting Claude’s capabilities at scale, according to the report, though it did not name ByteDance.
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