Ako Yumigeta’s 1st photobook is out now!📘 Shot in her hometown Hamamatsu with ballet & sweet treats✨ More pics & full interview👇 #AkoYumigeta# #MorningMusume25# #HelloProject# @MorningMusumeMg

ByteDance’s Zhang Yiming has become Asia’s richest person for the first time, marking a comeback for the TikTok developer as fortunes linked to AI surge above the billionaires of traditional industry. Pui Gwen Yeung has more.

China's Zhang Yiming becomes Asia’s richest person for the first time, overtaking India's Gautam Adani and marking a comeback for the TikTok developer. Read more: 📷️: Kobi Wolf/Bloomberg, Gilles Sabrie/Bloomberg

⚡️BREAKING: Zhang Yiming says ByteDance will not use distillation as a shortcut to catch up in AI, even if that means its LLMs temporarily fall behind Chinese rivals. According to The Information, Zhang made the remarks at a Seed team all-hands last month, telling the team to sacrifice short-term gains for longer-term goals. Distillation allows a new model to learn from the outputs of a stronger model, saving training time and compute. But ByteDance is choosing a harder path: building its own frontier models more independently. The bigger concern may be political risk. ByteDance has spent years under U.S. scrutiny over TikTok. If the company were accused of extracting capabilities from leading American AI models at scale, it could give Washington another reason to pressure TikTok. Anthropic has previously accused several Chinese AI firms of extracting capabilities from Claude, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Zhipu and Alibaba, but not ByteDance. #ByteDance# #distillation# #seedance# #LLMs# #TikTok#