Today Capital founder Xu Xin — widely known as China's "venture capital queen" — revealed on the podcast High Energy that ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming spends half of his time on Seed, the company's AI research team.
She was advising another guest, Xinghaitu CEO Gao Jiyang, to dial back on daily management and focus more on model direction. Xu noted that even though Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) is already a massive business, Zhang still devotes half his time to Seed.
Seed is ByteDance's AI research team, founded in 2023. Its focus areas include large language models, speech, vision, world models, and AI infrastructure. It already provides model capabilities for products like Doubao, Coze, and Jimeng.