[Zhang Yiming: Prefer Temporary Lag in Large Models Over Taking the Distillation Shortcut] According to monitoring by Dongcha Beating, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming explicitly stated during last month's all-hands meeting of the Seed team that the company would not use distillation as a shortcut to catch up with large models, even if it means temporarily falling behind domestic competitors. He urged the team to be willing to sacrifice short-term gains in exchange for long-term goals. Distillation is a process where a new model learns from the outputs of a stronger model, which can save training time and computational resources. Internally, ByteDance acknowledges that avoiding this approach will make it harder for Seed's language model to catch up with domestic peers like DeepSeek, Kimi, and Qianwen in the short term. However, ByteDance is more concerned about political risks. The company has long faced scrutiny from the U.S. government over TikTok. Although TikTok's U.S. data security operations have introduced American capital, ByteDance still retains shares and continues to operate TikTok's global commercial business. If accused of massively extracting capabilities from cutting-edge U.S. models, Washington could renew pressure on TikTok. Anthropic previously accused DeepSeek, Dark Side of the Moon, MiniMax, Zhipu, and Alibaba of massively extracting capabilities from Claude, though ByteDance was not named. [Original Link]