Zhang Yiming, co-founder of ByteDance, stated internally that ByteDance's AI will not catch up with Anthropic and OpenAI until at least 2029, according to Bloomberg. According to Bloomberg, Zhang Yiming recently stated at an all-hands meeting with the AI team that ByteDance has the capability to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI in cutting-edge AI fields. However, he also cautioned the team that truly catching up with these companies will not be possible until at least 2029 or 2030. Zhang Yiming admitted that the pre-training data scale of ByteDance's Seed series of large models is several orders of magnitude smaller than that of its top US competitors. He reiterated that the team should not overly rely on model distillation—that is, using the output of stronger models to train its own models—but should focus on the long term.