ByteDance plans to launch a Muse-like AI assistant within weeks

Bloomberg reported that ByteDance plans to launch an AI assistant—designed to compete with Meta’s Muse—within the next few weeks. The move aims to reinforce its leadership in AI-powered video generation and accelerate its catch-up with top U.S. AI labs. This strategy was formally announced by co-founder Zhang Yiming during a recent internal meeting with the company’s entire AI team, which set a clear goal of achieving technical parity with leading institutions such as Anthropic and OpenAI by 2029 or 2030. Zhang emphasized data infrastructure as the top current priority, noting that the training dataset for the Seed language model lags significantly behind those of top international peers. The new AI assistant will serve as a key complement to the Seedance series of video-generation models; total investment in the initiative is expected to reach up to $70 billion. Currently, the Seed project team comprises approximately 1,000 researchers and engineers, led by an executive who joined ByteDance from G