ByteDance prepares a Muse-like AI agent for the coming weeks

Image: ByteDance

ByteDance is preparing an AI assistant for release in the coming weeks, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with an all-hands meeting of its AI team. The report says the agent will serve a similar role to Meta's Muse. It did not name the product or describe how it works, and ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment.

At the meeting, co-founder Zhang Yiming set out the timeline. He told staff ByteDance can compete with Anthropic and OpenAI at the frontier, but said reaching that level would take until 2029 or 2030 at the earliest. The gap he named was data. According to the report, the training sets behind ByteDance's Seed language models are orders of magnitude smaller than those used by leading US labs.

He also argued against distillation, the practice of training a model on the outputs of a larger one. US officials and Anthropic's chief executive have criticised several Chinese labs for relying on it.

The contrast here is reach against research. ByteDance's Doubao app gives it a large consumer base in China, and its Seedance video models have travelled widely, with Bloomberg reporting up to $70 billion committed to video AI. Its Seed language models have not led global benchmarks. An agent that carries out tasks rather than answering questions would be a new kind of product for the company.

A Muse-style assistant is not a chatbot. Meta's Muse, launched in September, talks by voice, appears as an animated character, runs on its smart glasses and is headed for a dedicated device called the Muse Charm. It has more than 10 million users, and Mark Zuckerberg has said it could earn more per user than Meta's family of apps. Bloomberg's report does not say whether ByteDance plans hardware of its own.

That leaves the questions the report cannot answer. Which markets the assistant launches in, how much personal data it can reach, and whether regulators outside China would allow it are all unresolved. For now the launch rests on a single sourced report rather than a company announcement.