Zhang Yiming tells ByteDance's Seed team: short-term lag OK, distillation is a dead end
vista8 · x · 2026-10-30
According to an exclusive report by LatePost, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming joined Seed head Wu Yonghui for an all-hands meeting. Key takeaways:
- Short-term lag is acceptable: Training frontier models is hard; the goal is reaching the world's top tier and pursuing the upper bound of intelligence.
- Coding is key: Resources from Volcano Engine, Feishu, and Doubao will be integrated to build compute and data advantages, though coding is just one of many bigger opportunities ahead.
- Seedance praised: Encouraged to build distinctive models rather than follow existing routes.
- Against distillation: Distillation merely replicates Claude's existing capabilities — at best it closes the gap, never surpasses. Seed should build AGI moats from more fundamental dimensions.
Zhang added ByteDance will invest even more in AI going forward.
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