Zhang Yiming: ByteDance Will Not Take the Shortcut of Distillation

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming stated at a meeting with the entire Seed team that the company will not use distillation as a shortcut to catch up with large models, even if it means temporarily lagging behind domestic competitors. He emphasized that the team should be willing to sacrifice short-term gains to achieve long-term goals. Distillation technology allows new models to learn from the outputs of stronger models, thereby saving training time and computational power. Internally, ByteDance believes that not taking this route will make it more difficult for Seed's language model to catch up with domestic competitors such as DeepSeek, Kimi, and Qianwen in the short term. ByteDance is also concerned about political risks due to TikTok's long-standing scrutiny by the U.S. government. Although TikTok's U.S. data security operations have brought in American capital, ByteDance still retains shares and continues to operate its global business. If accused of large-scale extraction of cutting-edge U.S. models, Washington may exert pressure on TikTok again. Anthropic has accused DeepSeek, Dark Side of the Moon, MiniMax, Zhiyu, and Alibaba of large-scale extraction of Claude's capabilities, but did not mention ByteDance.

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