[ByteDance first issues Seed option and distributes special shares of bean bags to prevent Tencent from poaching] According to the monitoring of BEATING, ByteDance is the first time to distribute independent options for specific business departments. According to the Financial Times, in order to prevent Tencent and other competitors from poaching, ByteDance recently granted low price special stock options named after bean bags to employees in Seed Department of its AI laboratory, so that employees can directly share the growth dividend of AI business without being affected by the dilution of equity in different business lines of the Group. The option scheme is a special option that is bound to a single business unit for the first time since the establishment of ByteDance. With the intensification of the talent competition in the field of large-scale modeling in China, core engineering positions such as infrastructure and data annotation have become the focus of competition. Since the establishment of Seed Lab in 2023, ByteDance has become Nvidia's largest customer in China with large-scale computing infrastructure investment, attracting a large number of top AI researchers. However, since Tencent admitted at the end of 2025 that its big model development was lagging behind, it has recently conducted intensive targeted poaching led by former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu. Xiao Xuefeng, a senior member of Seed Visual Platform who recently resigned, and Zhang Chi, an infrastructure expert, have both joined Tencent. In order to cope with the poaching, ByteDance provided the global Seed employees with the option to subscribe for beanbag special shares of $13 per share this month, up nearly 30% from $10 per share at the end of 2025, reflecting the improvement of the commercialization of the beanbag model and the performance of the model. Although the option mechanism can provide substantial potential returns, there are also controversies within the organization. Some insiders revealed that the Seed laboratory team has reached a size of 2000 people, and the internal organizational structure is facing challenges of bureaucratization and fragmented responsibilities. In contrast, Tencent's AI team is smaller in size and has promised researchers broader autonomy, management responsibilities, and more attractive compensation packages. In addition to Tencent, DeepSeek is also facing fierce talent competition pressure. At present, it is raising the first round of funds from investors to retain its core team. ByteDance has also successfully recruited many core infrastructure members of DeepSeek in 2025. [Original link]