ByteDance plans to release an AI agent similar to Meta’s Muse in the coming weeks, according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with a recent all-hands meeting of ByteDance’s AI team. Muse, which Meta launched in September, is a voice-based assistant represented by an animated avatar, and Meta is putting it on its smart glasses and a dedicated gadget, but it’s not clear if ByteDance plans hardware too. At the meeting, ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming said the company could match OpenAI and Anthropic on frontier models by 2029 or 2030 at the earliest, and he noted that its Seed models train on far smaller datasets than rivals use. ByteDance’s biggest lead for now is in AI video through its Seedance models, and it’s weighing as much as $70B in AI spending.
