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ByteDance
TechTech Trends

Exclusive | AI takes priority at TikTok owner ByteDance, as Sora disrupts the future of video creation

  • ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming and other key voices at the company view AI as a battle that it cannot afford to lose, a source says
  • Zhang, who is no longer CEO but still holds major sway at the firm, has been spending a lot of time studying AI, according to Chinese reports

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This screenshot is taken from a video generated by Sora, an AI that turns text descriptions into clips. ByteDance, which owns video-sharing app TikTok, is putting more focus on AI as new technologies threaten to change how people create videos. Photo: OpenAI
Coco Fengin BeijingandZhou Xinin Hong Kong
TikTok owner ByteDance is mobilising resources to generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) projects, as the Beijing-based tech giant doubles down on efforts to catch up with OpenAI’s conversational bot ChatGPT and text-to-video generator Sora.
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Liang Rubo, who took over as chief executive from co-founder Zhang Yiming in 2021, has set out three objectives for ByteDance with regard to GenAI this quarter: strengthen the recruitment of AI talent, enhance the organisational structure, and improve fundamental research, according to people with access to internal briefings, who declined to be named because the information is private.

ByteDance’s website lists more than 300 job openings related to GenAI, over 100 of them related to large language models (LLMs), the technology that is used to train ChatGPT and similar chatbots.

The company recently hired Jiang Lu, who was a key contributor to Google’s VideoPoet, an LLM designed for generating videos that was unveiled late last year.

ByteDance is “secretly” working on multiple AI products, including text-to-image and text-to-video technology, according to a report on Wednesday by Chinese media outlet Jiemian.

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