ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming reportedly told the company’s Seed AI research team last month that it would not rely on AI distillation to improve its models, even if that meant temporarily falling behind rivals.
AI distillation is a training method in which a smaller model learns from the outputs of a larger model. The report described the statement as being made at an internal Seed team meeting and did not say that ByteDance had adopted a companywide ban on every form of model distillation. [TechNode reporting]