ByteDance
In plain wordsThe Chinese company that owns TikTok, which also runs Doubao, China's most popular AI chatbot, and builds image and video generators.
A Chinese internet company, best known for the short-video apps Douyin (in China) and TikTok (abroad), that has become one of China's largest AI developers and buyers of AI chips. Its recommendation algorithmsrecommender system, n.: Software that guesses which songs, products, posts or jobs you are most likely to want and shows those first, as when a video app lines up the next clip or a shop suggests an add-on., which personalize short-video feeds from viewing behavior, were among the most successful consumer applications of machine learning. Its Doubao assistant, launched in August 2023 and priced aggressively, became China's most-used AI chatbot by late 2024; its Seed research team develops the underlying language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. and reasoning modelsreasoning model, n.: An AI model trained to work through a problem step by step in hidden 'thinking' text before it answers. Letting it think longer generally makes it better at math, coding and planning., the Seedream image generator, the Seedance video generatortext-to-video model, n.: An AI that creates a short video clip — increasingly with matching sound — from a written description, such as 'a paper boat sailing down a rainy street'. and UI-TARS, a GUI agentGUI agent, n.: An AI agent that works through the buttons, menus and screens of ordinary software — on a desktop, phone or website — instead of through behind-the-scenes programming interfaces., while its Volcano Engine cloud sells model access to businesses. Seedance 2.0 (2026) drew protests from Hollywood studios over clips imitating copyrighted characters and real actors.
Origin
Founded in 2012 in Beijing by Zhang Yiming and Liang Rubo; its news app Toutiao, and later Douyin (2016) and TikTok (2017), were built around algorithmic recommendation. It organized its foundation-model research under the Seed name from about 2023.
Related
- recommender systemrecommender system, n.: Software that guesses which songs, products, posts or jobs you are most likely to want and shows those first, as when a video app lines up the next clip or a shop suggests an add-on.
- large language modellarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code.
- text-to-video modeltext-to-video model, n.: An AI that creates a short video clip — increasingly with matching sound — from a written description, such as 'a paper boat sailing down a rainy street'.
- AlibabaAlibaba, prop. n.: A Chinese e-commerce and cloud-computing giant whose Qwen family of AI models, mostly free to download, is among the most widely used in the world.
- DeepSeekDeepSeek, prop. n.: A Chinese artificial intelligence company whose free, cheaply trained models startled the world in January 2025 by nearly matching the best American systems.
- GUI agentGUI agent, n.: An AI agent that works through the buttons, menus and screens of ordinary software — on a desktop, phone or website — instead of through behind-the-scenes programming interfaces.