"Venture capital queen" Xu Xin, founder of Today Capital, revealed on the High Energy podcast that ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming spends 50% of his time on Seed, the company's AI research unit. She was advising another guest, Gao Jiyang, CEO of Xinghai Tu, to cut back on daily management and focus more on model development. 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, established in 2023, working on large language models, speech, vision, world models, and AI infrastructure. Its models already power products like Doubao, Kouzi, and Jimeng.