According to a Bloomberg report on November 11, ByteDance plans to launch an AI assistant similar to Meta Muse in the coming weeks, further expanding into the agent arena and consolidating its advantage in AI video generation. The move is also an important step for ByteDance to accelerate its efforts to catch up with top U.S. AI labs, with the company aiming to narrow the technology gap with industry leaders in about three years.
People familiar with the matter said that ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming recently introduced the plan to researchers, engineers, and related support staff at an all-hands meeting for the AI team, and made clear the priorities for follow-up work. Zhang said ByteDance is capable of competing with companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI in frontier AI, but that it may take until at least 2029 or 2030 to truly reach the technical level of those companies.
It is reported that the new AI agent will play a role similar to Muse, which Meta launched in September this year. Muse integrates Meta’s long-accumulated AI research results into a voice interaction assistant, is equipped with an animated avatar, and can help users complete a variety of tasks; after its launch, it received a relatively positive response in the U.S. market. ByteDance’s move this time means it is further expanding from generative AI products toward agents capable of task execution.
