According to a Dec. 8 report in the Financial Times.ByteDanceInsiders say ByteHop founderZhang YimingAlthough he has stepped down as CEO.But he has been actively involved in the group's AI strategic.
These sources said thatZhang Yiming personally oversaw the recruitment of AI engineers and researchers from rival companiesZhang Yiming has spoken internally about his goal of "general artificial intelligence," a system with human-like intelligence. Zhang Yiming spoke internally about his goal of "generalized AI," a system with human-like intelligence.
The report also mentions that some industry insiders are skeptical of this goal, as the company has made several failed big bets on the future of technology. He has previously made huge investments in gaming, virtual reality and online education, with ByteHop investing billions of dollars, only to end up shutting down or selling their investments.
ByteDance has attracted top AI engineers and researchers away from Alibaba and startups like Zero One Everything and Smart Spectrum in recent months, according to several people with knowledge of the hiring boom. It has also created and expanded teams to develop its large-scale language models and AI products.
ByteDance is pouring billions of dollars into AI infrastructure. It has purchased enough top-tier GPUs over the past two years to build advanced AI models, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
I1AI notes that the report also claims that ByteDance has a team working on AI chips after poaching leading talent from rival chip companies. According to people familiar with the matterThe team is building an AI Accelerator Specialized Integrated Circuit (ASIC)It's a specialized AI chip for machine learning, modeled after Google's Tensor Processing Unit.