Bytedance Makes Major Investment Shift Towards Generative AI

Bytedance is going all-in on generative AI, creating over 300 job vacancies and enhancing its corporate framework to focus on this emerging technology.

The parent company behind the popular social media platform TikTok, Bytedance, is making a significant investment shift towards generative AI, according to a recent report by the South China Morning Post. The Chinese conglomerate is taking substantial measures to integrate generative AI into its business, including augmenting its AI team, enhancing its corporate framework, and intensifying its foundational research initiatives.

Bytedance views the advancement in generative AI as a critical challenge and is determined to come out on top. To achieve this, the company has created over 300 job vacancies related to AI, with over a hundred positions focused on large language models (LLMs), the technology behind generative AI models.

While Bytedance has received acclaim for its innovative TikTok recommendation algorithm, which has contributed to the platform’s explosive growth, the company has been somewhat slow to initiate research into LLMs. However, Bytedance is now investing significant resources into AI research and has launched a variety of AI models, including a range of AI-driven products such as text-to-image and text-to-video technologies, and the CapCut video editing tool.

In mid-January 2024, Bytedance introduced MagicVideo-V2, an AI model that transforms text into video. This model surpasses existing text-to-video (T2V) systems by employing a suite of integrated modules designed to produce videos of superior quality. Bytedance is also developing its own platform to let users create custom chatbots tailored to specific needs, similar to OpenAI’s GPT Maker.

Bytedance’s focus on generative AI comes after OpenAI’s mid-February launch of the Sora video generator, which highlighted the early development stage of Bytedance’s own AI video animation tool, Boximator. A spokesperson from Bytedance acknowledged that “it still has a big gap with leading video generation models in terms of image quality, fidelity, and duration.”

Bytedance’s investment in generative AI is part of a broader trend in the tech industry, with generative AI creating over 10,000 new job listings in 2023 alone. In China, over 40 AI models were approved in just six months, with 14 LLMs approved in the last week of January 2024.

As Bytedance continues to invest in generative AI, it remains to be seen how this technology will be integrated into the company’s products and how it will impact the broader tech industry. However, one thing is clear: Bytedance is determined to be a major player in the generative AI space.

Source: SCMP

Grow your business with AI. Be an AI expert at your company in 5 mins per week with this Free AI Newsletter