ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, plans to release an AI assistant in the coming weeks that is similar to Meta’s Muse AI agent. The Chinese company aims to close the gap with leading U.S. AI companies. Bloomberg reported this exclusively on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter who asked to remain anonymous.
According to Bloomberg, ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming recently informed his AI team about the plan at an internal meeting and outlined the key priorities. Zhang was said to be convinced that ByteDance could compete on equal footing with industry giants such as Anthropic and OpenAI in three or four years.
The planned AI agent is expected to perform a function similar to that of Meta’s personal AI assistant Muse, which is designed to be easy for anyone to use and capable of handling everyday tasks such as emails and online orders. Meta is integrating Muse into its entire hardware portfolio, from its smart glasses models to the AI gadget called Muse Charm, which consists of nothing more than a smartwatch-sized screen. However, it remains unclear whether ByteDance is also planning corresponding hardware, Bloomberg said.
ByteDance is taking a long-term approach
According to Bloomberg’s sources, Zhang said ByteDance’s AI language models were trained on datasets orders of magnitude smaller than those used by leading competitors.According to Bloomberg, Zhang’s remarks provided “a rare insight into the thinking of the entrepreneur behind TikTok and Doubao, China’s most popular AI chatbot.” They reflected Zhang’s “renewed ambition” to once again take a leading role in an area of AI that had been lost to players such as the Chinese AI company DeepSeek.
In the meeting referenced by Bloomberg, Zhang reportedly reaffirmed his view that ByteDance should not focus on “distillation.” Instead, the company needs to think long term. Distillation refers to a practice in which a less capable AI model is trained using the results of a more powerful model—a criticism repeatedly levelled by US companies against Chinese competitors.
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