TikTik Owner ByteDance Looks to Build Up US AI Team

ByteDance is reportedly hiring for dozens of open positions on its U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) team.

That’s according to a report Thursday (Feb. 19) from Bloomberg News, which said this is an effort by the Chinese tech giant to compete with American AI companies despite ongoing national security fears from the U.S. government.

The report cites listings on the company’s career page, with jobs involving things like “producing international data” for ByteDance’s large language models and conducting research to create human-like AI.

As the report noted, the hiring campaign follows the announcement that ByteDance had struck a deal to sell parts of its U.S. stake in social media platform TikTok to non-Chinese owners. That sale was aimed at addressing concerns that ByteDance could use TikTok to collect data on Americans or disseminate information favorable to the Chinese government. The company has denied those things have or would happen.

Outside of its social media business, ByteDance is also a major player in the AI space, the report added, with its Doubao chatbot the most downloaded AI service of its kind among Chinese users last year.

The company’s Seedance tool has also caught the attention of Hollywood, with studios sending cease-and-desist letters after Seedance was used to create alternate endings to TV shows and fake movie scenes featuring A-list actors.

A spokesperson for ByteDance told Bloomberg the company respects intellectual property rights and is working on boosting its safeguards to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likenesses.

As PYMNTS wrote last week, the rise of Seedance 2.0 ties into a larger ecosystem pivot toward multimodal AI, where the ability to seamlessly combine text, visual and auditory outputs is becoming a key differentiator among top artificial intelligence models.

“While text-centric systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT remain widely used, video and multimedia generation represent a rapidly growing frontier with implications for creative industries and commercial content workflows,” that report said.

OpenAI introduced its own text-to-video model, Sora, created to generate realistic video clips from written prompts. Sora can create minute-long, high-fidelity scenes with consistent characters and complex motion, a sign that video generation is shifting from experimental novelty to production-grade capability.

At the same time, as covered here, social media platforms are reconfiguring their products to deal with the surge in AI-generated content.

“Companies including Meta and Pinterest have begun overhauling feeds and labeling systems to more clearly distinguish between human-created and AI-generated posts, reflecting mounting pressure around transparency and trust,” the report added.