China’s Largest AI Model Is Being Developed at Bytedance

Bytedance is training an AI model with up to ten trillion parameters, according to the Financial Times. That’s three times the size of Moonshot’s Kimi K3, currently the largest Chinese model. It would put the TikTok parent company in the same ballpark as Anthropic’s top system Mythos 5, which industry estimates place at around eight trillion parameters.

Anthropic hasn’t disclosed its own numbers. Three insiders told the FT that the model is in pretraining, a phase that typically takes three to six months. Parameters determine how much a model can store, but performance also depends on data quality and training methods. One of the sources says Bytedance has avoided distillation, meaning training on outputs from other companies’ models, for over a year. Founder Zhang Yiming told the 2,000-person Seed team internally to aim for world-leading model capabilities over the long term. xAI is also training Grok variants with six and ten trillion parameters on its Colossus 2 cluster, according to Elon Musk.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1Ad Follow The Decoder for AI news, background stories and expert analyses.