Besides, ByteDance is looking forward to descending triangle pattern strengthening its position in areas such as e-commerce and gaming. Talking about valuation, ByteDance is reportedly worth over US$100 billion as of May 2020 based on recent prices for the Chinese company’s shares on secondary markets, according to the Financial Times. Thus now ByteDance is valued over one-third higher than that in November 2018, when it was valued at around $ 75-$78 billion. In the year 2006, Yimimg became the fifth employee and first engineer at the travel website Kuxun. In 2008, Yiming joined Microsoft, however found it tough to cope up with the company rules of Microsoft which made him leave Microsoft to join Fanfou (Twitter clone in China). In 2009, Fanfou was shut down owing to certain controversies, and that very year, Yiming started his very first startup 99fang.com, which is a real estate search portal.
- What’s more, In 2021, the value of the company was around $250 Billion.
- ByteDance has overtaken Baidu to become the second-largest performer in China.
- This federal legislation was signed into law by former President Joe Biden in 2024.
- Every video that ByteDance’s users watch or post gives the company another data point about how people use the internet.
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Additionally, we introduce UNO, which consists of progressive cross-modal alignment and universal rotary position embedding. It is a multi-image conditioned subject-to-image model iteratively trained from a text-to-image model. Extensive experiments show that our method can achieve high consistency while ensuring controllability in both single-subject and multi-subject driven generation. A large number of US lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats — are not convinced that TikTok is independent of Beijing despite being headquartered outside China.
Toutiao: personalized content aggregation and distribution
There are several types of TikTok ads, including In-Feed ads, Brand Takeovers, and Branded Hashtag Challenges. Amidst the coronavirus crisis, while many companies are busy cutting down their workforce, ByteDance in April 2020, announced that it is hiring staff to fill 10,000 vacant posts in different domains. In 2020, ByteDance is planning to hire 40,000 employees, in a bid to match Alibaba’s headcount.
- ByteDance’s founders have a 20 percent stake, and the remainder is held by employees, according to TikTok.
- Unlike other businesses, ByteDance uses the SSP platform, which makes this company unique.
- Today, the TikTok platform, which is available outside of China, has become the leading destination for short-form mobile videos worldwide.
- Its chatbot, Doubao, gained 60 million users within its first three months on the market in 2024.
- It followed that success with the launch of Douyin in September 2016.
To evaluate alignment with human-centric preferences, ByteDance conducted human testing across a range of domains, including creative writing, humanities knowledge and general conversation. The STEM data leaned heavily on advanced mathematics, accounting for over 80% of the problem set. Additional logic data included tasks like Sudoku and 24-point puzzles, with adjustable difficulty to match model progress. Seed-Thinking-v1.5 shows strong performance on a suite of challenging tasks, scoring 86.7% on AIME 2024, 55.0% pass@8 on Codeforces and 77.3% on the GPQA science benchmark. These results place it close to or matching models like OpenAI’s o3-mini-high and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro on specific reasoning metrics.
What does ByteDance mean?
House Committee on Energy and Commerce to address accusations that the app is a threat to American national security. Chew downplayed any connection to or favouritism toward China’s government and elaborated on the steps the company planned to take to better protect the data of American users. Despite this reassurance, the U.S. state of Montana passed a law to ban the app in the state. In 2016 ByteDance released the video-sharing app Douyin, exclusively for users in China. The popularity of Douyin in China inspired the team to develop TikTok for international audiences.
ByteDance’s revenue increased to $ 17 billion in 2019, from $7.4 billion in 2018. ByteDance took a larger piece of the digital advertising market than fellow Chinese companies like Tencent and Baidu during the first half of 2019. ByteDance has overtaken Baidu to become the second-largest performer in China. ByteDance took 23% of all digital media to spend in the broker liteforex first half of the year 2019, which is equivalent to $7 billion. ByteDance is part of a growing number of Chinese companies setting its sights on overseas markets including the U.S. Project Liberty, an organization led by former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt with the intention of “constructing a new internet infrastructure,” submitted a bid to ByteDance earlier this year.
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Company officials initially rebuffed these claims but later admitted that their employees had obtained data from American TikTok users, including journalists and those connected to them. According to Baker-White, this misuse of data included spying on her and other users’ IP addresses in an attempt to track an internal mole at the company who was thought to be in contact with reporters. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that they had begun an investigation in late 2022 into the claim against ByteDance.
Its sources state ByteDance has hired “engineers with experience in hardware design” for work on this project. Seed-Thinking-v1.5 results from collaboration within ByteDance’s Seed LLM Systems team, led by Yonghui Wu and with public representation by Haibin Lin, a long-time AI contributor. These features would be valuable for engineers responsible for scaling LLM operations across cloud and on-prem systems. For technical leads managing the lifecycle of large language models—from data curation to deployment—Seed-Thinking-v1.5 presents an opportunity to rethink how reasoning capabilities are integrated into enterprise AI stacks. For supervised fine-tuning (SFT), the team curated 400,000 samples, including 300,000 verifiable (STEM, logic and coding tasks) and 100,000 non-verifiable problems like creative writing and role-playing.
What Is ByteDance, The TikTok Parent In US Crosshairs?
It’s also worth mentioning that ByteDance acquired VR headset maker Pico in August 2021, which is even more evidence pointing toward its increasing interest in consumer-focused AI products. Its modular training process, which includes verifiable reasoning datasets and multi-phase reinforcement learning, particularly appeals to teams looking to scale LLM development while retaining fine-grained control. The Streaming Rollout System (SRS) is a notable innovation that separates model evolution from runtime execution. It accelerates iteration speed by asynchronously managing partially completed generations across model versions.
In addition to McCourt, “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have committed to the bid. On Monday, three Democratic senators sent a letter to Trump, asking the president to work with Congress on “any potential resolutions to the TikTok ban.” The Trump administration did not immediately respond for comment when contacted by USA TODAY on Friday. The company says it has more than 150,000 employees in almost 120 cities around the world. A large number of US lawmakers – Republicans and Democrats – are not convinced that TikTok is independent of Beijing despite being headquartered outside China.
Introduced in January just days before the initial ban, the act, if passed, would extend the TikTok moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game sale deadline to Oct. 16, 2025. On Wednesday, Trump told reporters he’d consider lowering tariffs on China to encourage Beijing, where ByteDance is based, to support a sale of TikTok’s U.S. assets. However, the president ultimately said he’ll just extend the ban again if a deal isn’t finalized by the deadline. TikTok’s CEO has told Congress that the firm has never been asked by the Chinese government for US user data nor has it provided it. The team plans to continue refining reinforcement learning techniques, focusing on training efficiency and reward modeling for non-verifiable tasks. The public release of internal benchmarks such as BeyondAIME is intended to foster broader advancement in reasoning-focused AI research.
More importantly, all of this has supposedly started within the past year, which is when ByteDance allegedly began its AI glasses project. To support efficient large-scale training, ByteDance built a system atop its HybridFlow framework. Execution is handled by Ray clusters, and training and inference processes are co-located to reduce GPU idle time. Reinforcement learning in Seed-Thinking-v1.5 is powered by custom actor-critic (VAPO) and policy-gradient (DAPO) frameworks, developed to address known instabilities in RL training.
ByteDance also launched Toutiao, a news aggregation app which uses algorithms to suggest articles and videos to users, in 2012. It’s one of the largest news aggregation apps in China and is installed on over 250 million monthly unique devices, according to data from Chinese market research firm, iResearch. ByteDance does not regularly release official user numbers for its apps. ByteDance has also been accused of using apps like TikTok to employ intrusive data-gathering techniques. In 2022 Forbes technology reporter Emily Baker-White claimed that she had been spied on and tracked by ByteDance after writing an article critical of TikTok.
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