⚡️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#