ByteDance Tells Staff To Avoid AI Model Distillation As China US Race Intensifies
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming has told employees to avoid using AI model distillation to improve the company's systems, even if it means sacrificing short-term performance gains. The decision reflects a "long-termism" strategy and comes amid intensifying US-China tensions over AI technology.
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming has explicitly ruled out the use of AI model distillation to advance the company's artificial intelligence capabilities, even if it means temporarily falling behind domestic rivals.
During a recent internal meeting with the Seed AI research team, Zhang told employees that AI development requires "long-termism and delayed gratification, rather than using others' output to achieve short-term leaderboard rankings".
The decision, reported by China's state-backed outlet The Paper, shuts down a two-year internal debate over whether to use outputs from more advanced models to accelerate ByteDance's own large language model development.
Model distillation, a technique where a new model learns from the outputs of a more powerful system, has become a major flashpoint in the intensifying AI race between the United States and China.
Washington and leading U.S. AI firms have accused Chinese rivals of using distillation to extract capabilities from proprietary models. ByteDance's position is consistent with a 2023 policy that barred the use of GPT-generated data in its training sets, but Zhang's recent declaration reinforces the stance at a time when competitive pressure is mounting.
"We should be willing to sacrifice some short-term gains for longer-term goals." – Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance
Zhang's directive is not purely technical. The decision is reportedly influenced by ByteDance's complex relationship with the U.S. government over TikTok's ownership. With U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warning that Chinese companies could face financial sanctions or trade blacklists over AI practices, ByteDance is seeking to avoid actions that could endanger its prized social media platform. The company is also enforcing internal restrictions on distillation through API detection measures.
As ByteDance's Seed model family continues to develop without distillation, the company is betting that independent research will ultimately yield more sustainable and defensible AI capabilities.
Whether that bet pays off in the face of fierce competition from DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Alibaba remains to be seen. But for Zhang Yiming, the principle is clear: building original intelligence is worth more than borrowing someone else's.
