According to reports, recently, Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, clearly emphasized at an internal meeting that the development of large models must adhere to a long-term approach and delayed gratification, and should avoid using others' model outputs to temporarily boost rankings.

Zhang Yiming stated that even if ByteDance's Seed team is temporarily behind competitors in the field of artificial intelligence, it will absolutely not rely on AI distillation technology to improve its own models. "Distillation" refers to using data from more advanced frontier models to train their own AI models. Previously, AI giant Anthropic accused several companies of distilling its models, but the list of involved companies it published did not include ByteDance's Seed series models.

ByteDance

It is reported that ByteDance has strictly prohibited the distillation of open-source models internally, and has comprehensively strengthened compliance restrictions through technical means such as API detection. Zhang Yiming pointed out that relying on distillation may bring short-term effects, but it would seriously interfere with real long-term technological breakthroughs.

As global large model development enters deeper waters, the innovation of technological sources and the compliance of synthetic data have become the core focus of the industry. ByteDance's firm cut-off of distillation technology not only reflects its strategic determination for independent R&D and fundamental technology construction, but also indicates that the competition in large models is shifting from pursuing short-term performance indicators to long-term value competition focused on cultivating independent innovation capabilities.