[News] ByteDance Reportedly to Launch Meta Muse-Like AI Assistant Within Weeks, Eyes Up to US$70B in Broader AI Push

ByteDance is reportedly preparing to launch a Muse-like AI assistant in the coming weeks as it seeks to strengthen its lead in AI video generation, according to Bloomberg. Meta’s Muse combines voice-based interactions with an animated avatar to help users complete tasks and is being rolled out across the company’s hardware lineup, including smart glasses and the upcoming dedicated Muse Charm device. Whether ByteDance plans similar features or accompanying hardware remains unclear.

ByteDance has reportedly been developing personal AI agent capabilities for months. According to an earlier report by Caixin, the company launched an internal project codenamed “Spell” in April, led by its Doubao mobile assistant team. The project reportedly aims to integrate personal AI agent capabilities into Doubao, with efforts underway to accelerate its public release. However, it remains unclear whether the upcoming Muse-like assistant is related to Spell.

During a recent all-hands meeting with ByteDance’s AI team, co-founder Zhang Yiming reportedly outlined the company’s ambition to compete with leading AI developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Zhang believes ByteDance could eventually reach the technological frontier, though he cautioned that this may not happen until at least 2029 or 2030. Central to the strategy is a plan to invest as much as US$70 billion and establish Seedance as China’s leading AI video generation platform, Bloomberg reports.

Zhang also stressed the importance of developing AI capabilities independently. As noted by Bloomberg, he reiterated that ByteDance should avoid relying on distillation, a technique that uses outputs from larger models to train smaller ones, and instead focus on long-term research and development.

ByteDance’s AI Ambitions Beyond Video Generation

Despite its strength in AI video generation, ByteDance still trails leading developers in large language models (LLMs). Bloomberg notes that its Seed team remains the only major contender in China’s AI industry that has neither released an LLM approaching top global benchmark scores nor made its model weights available to developers. Video generation remains the area where ByteDance holds a meaningful competitive advantage.

ByteDance’s last major LLM update was Seed 2.1, released in June, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported in August that the company was pre-training a model with up to 10 trillion parameters, potentially approaching the estimated scale of Anthropic’s flagship Mythos model.

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(Photo credit: ByteDance)