ByteDance

ByteDance is a Beijing-based company that operates some of the world’s most popular social media platforms, including TikTok and Douyin. Founded in 2012, the company has quickly grown into one of the largest and most innovative technology firms globally, with a focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Notable executives include founder Zhang Yiming, CEO Liang Rubo and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. ByteDance has recently faced scrutiny from governments and competitors over data privacy and national security concerns. Despite these challenges, the company remains a major player in the global technology industry, with a growing footprint in markets around the world.

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China Weighs Nvidia Chip Purchase in Emergency Meetings With Tech Companies

By Qianer Liu · Dec 10, 2025 2:00am PST

China on Wednesday gathered its biggest tech giants to discuss whether to allow them to buy Nvidia’s advanced H200 chips, as President Donald Trump’s recent decision to allow the export of the powerful hardware to the country suddenly complicated Beijing’s goal to become technologically self-sufficient. Officials convened a series of emergency... China on Wednesday gathered its biggest tech giants to discuss whether to allow them to buy...

Photo by Getty Images; Art by Mike Sullivan

OpenAI Developing ‘Garlic’ Model to Counter Google’s Recent Gains

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Dec 2, 2025 7:00am PST · 2 comments

OpenAI, which in recent weeks has appeared to fall behind Google in AI development, is fighting back with a new large language model codenamed Garlic.Last week, OpenAI’s chief research officer Mark Chen told some colleagues about the new model, which was performing well on the company’s evaluations, at least when compared to Gemini 3 and ... OpenAI, which in recent weeks has appeared to fall behind Google in AI development, is fighting...

Ilya Sutskever and Dwarkesh Patel. Screenshot via YouTube

OpenAI Co-Founder Sutskever Joins the Skeptics

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Dec 1, 2025 7:00am PST · 3 comments

As Sri and I head to San Diego for the annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference this week (get in touch if you’ll also be there!), we’re excited to learn more about reinforcement learning, the model training technique du jour at all the major AI developers.There’s rising skepticism among researchers, including OpenAI co-founder ... As Sri and I head to San Diego for the annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference...

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ByteDance Challenges Alibaba’s Reign in China’s AI Cloud Market

By Juro Osawa · Dec 1, 2025 4:00am PST

ByteDance is best known in the U.S. as the owner of TikTok. In China, the tech giant is also becoming known as a major force in cloud computing—so much so that it is now threatening Alibaba Group, long the undisputed king of cloud services in China. In one sign of the intensifying rivalry, executives at Alibaba have started to focus on the... ByteDance is best known in the U.S. as the owner of TikTok. In China, the tech giant is also...

ByteDance’s Singapore headquarters. Photo via Getty

ByteDance’s Upcoming ‘World Model’; Altman’s Thoughts on the GPT-5 Fiasco, Profitability, and Going Public

By Juro Osawa, Qianer Liu and Jing Yang · Aug 18, 2025 7:00am PDT

Chinese developers of artificial intelligence software have already pulled ahead in domains like open-source and video generation. Now, one such developer is trying their hand at making AI models that can generate realistic worlds that users can explore, like immersive video games.ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is developing such an AI,... Chinese developers of artificial intelligence software have already pulled ahead in domains like...

Art by Mike Sullivan

ByteDance Developing Mixed Reality Goggles in Challenge to Meta

By Juro Osawa and Wayne Ma · Jul 14, 2025 8:55am PDT

Competition in mixed reality devices is heating up. TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, is working on a lightweight mixed reality device that resembles a pair of goggles, according to three people with direct knowledge of the project. It’s following in the footsteps of Meta Platforms, which has been working on a similar product scheduled for release in... Competition in mixed reality devices is heating up. TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, is working on a...