ByteDance Founder Tells Staff to Avoid AI Distillation and Chase Long-Term Gains

pstAsiatech · x · 2026-08-07

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming recently told staff at an internal meeting to avoid using AI distillation.

He stated that AI development requires "long-termism and delayed gratification, rather than using others' output to achieve short-term leaderboard rankings." This stance reflects ByteDance's strategic focus on guiding its teams back to foundational, independent R&D amidst fierce competition in the large language model space.

Related event: Zhang Yiming Bans Model Distillation Internally for Long-Term AI Focus(5 posts)→

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