ByteDance plans to launch an artificial intelligence assistant similar to Meta's Muse in the coming weeks, Bloomberg reported on 11 November, in its most direct attempt yet to close the gap with the leading American AI labs.

The report, citing people familiar with a recent all-hands meeting of ByteDance's AI team, said co-founder Zhang Yiming set out the plan to researchers, engineers and support staff. The new assistant is expected to arrive within weeks, although few product details have been made public.

A long road to the frontier

Zhang told the meeting that ByteDance can compete with OpenAI and Anthropic at the cutting edge, but not before 2029 or 2030. His stated concern was data: the company's Seed language models are pre-trained on datasets orders of magnitude smaller than those of its frontier rivals, and he said the company should not rely on distillation to catch up.

The Seed team numbers 1,000 researchers and engineers and is led by Wu Yonghui, who joined ByteDance from Google DeepMind in 2025. Its last language-model update, Seed 2.1, arrived in June. The new assistant is meant to build on ByteDance's existing strength in AI video, where its Seedance models are already a paid product.

What is still unknown

Meta introduced Muse in September as a voice-based agent with an animated avatar, and has begun adding it to smart glasses and a planned device called the Muse Charm. Whether ByteDance will pair its assistant with hardware of its own remains unclear, as does whether it will reach users outside China.

The company did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment, and reports alongside the plan also mentioned spending of up to $70 billion on the wider catch-up effort. Until a product is shown, the assistant remains a reported plan rather than a confirmed launch.