Zhang Yiming Rejects Model Distillation; DeepSeek Announces Major API Price Hikes

pstAsiatech · x · 2026-08-07

As competition among domestic large models intensifies, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming explicitly stated internally his stance to "reject distillation." He emphasized a commitment to long-termism, arguing that the company should not rely on others' outputs for short-term leaderboard rankings. ByteDance has strictly prohibited distilling open-source models internally, as Zhang believes it interferes with genuine long-term technological breakthroughs.

On the same day, DeepSeek announced plans to significantly increase the pricing of its API services in the near future. Industry analysts suggest that following the public beta of the DeepSeek-V4-Flash official version, this price hike indicates the upcoming release of the more powerful V4-Pro version, which will impact overall compute utilization.

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