ByteDance plans a Muse-like AI assistant in the coming weeks, while co-founder Zhang Yiming told staff the company may not match OpenAI and Anthropic at the frontier until 2029 or 2030.

ByteDance is preparing to launch a Muse-like AI agent, reportedly called Spell, in the coming weeks. It's been in internal testing since April and is expected to integrate with existing Doubao assistant. Co-founder Zhang Yiming outlined the plan to ByteDance's AI team.

ByteDance just launched Seedream 5.5🚀 Outperforming GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst & Nano Banana 2.1 in both text rendering fidelity and visual realism. What's new: • Supports continued work on the same image across 100 rounds of editing. • Native transparent/translucent background export (Alpha channel) • Doubled usability for cinematic and office use cases vs. 5.0 Pro Seedream 5.5 is gradually rolling out across Dreamina, Doubao, Doubao Work, and Volcano Engine Ark.

ByteDance is reportedly considering a Brazil data center expansion that would go beyond its existing $10B, 300 MW project in Ceará, on top of the tens of billions it has already announced there. Brazil's data center capacity has passed 1 GW, doubling since 2022, and Brasscom expects about 20% annual growth through 2031, which means more demand for chips and servers from Nvidia $NVDA and $AMD. The AI buildout is far from over, and the catch is power, with a Brazilian energy lawyer warning the grid can't take all the plants trying to connect.

ByteDance Seed's Cola2 spotted on GitHub: an LM that diffuses latents first, tokens second it groups text into semantic spans, a diffusion transformer generates one latent per span, a decoder turns it into tokens 346.03B tokens, 60.10 avg on 8 tasks. weights coming soon