Recent reports suggest that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, made an offer of $1.4 million annually to poach a talent from OpenAI’s ChatGPT R&D team. On April 24, a ByteDance spokesperson denied the report, claiming that it was false, based on the feedback from the Chinese media outlet, The Paper.
The ChatGPT is a chatbot that OpenAI released in November 2022 and is currently one of the foremost discussions in the technology sector. Its rise has instigated a virtual AI arms race, with multiple technology companies beginning to foray into this field. As an example, Alibaba launched its Tongyi Qianwen massive model product on April 7 and Tencent Cloud released its HCC high-performance computing cluster in mid-April.
Primarily, ByteDance did not make any public announcements related to its large-scale model product. However, a report from 36Kr stated that ByteDance has outlined its plans for this field, particularly language and image modalities. In response to that, the ByteDance spokesperson added that the firm had started to explore these two categories, but they were still in an immature stage.
On April 18, ByteDance’s own subsidiary, Volcano Engine, launched a new version of its machine learning platform which enables users to train models of millions of parameters with microsecond-level latency networks. This platform is also flexible, allowing users to reduce computing costs by 70%, along with three times better performance than the old instances.
According to Caixin, Tan Dai, President of Volcano Engine, said that more than 70% of entities focusing on this field have already leveraged their cloud services. Moreover, unlike other cloud vendors (like Microsoft-OpenAI co-operation, Amazon and Bedrock), Volcano Engine offers technical services and computing power to many model companies.
ByteDance is a Chinese internet technology company that has achieved widespread success with its core product, TikTok. Founded in 2012, this firm is headquartered in Beijing and has grown to become one of the leading providers of information technology services, with an overall valuation of over $140 billion. Tan Dai is a prominent figure in the ByteDance ecosystem, working as the President of Volcano Engine. He is highly experienced in the machine learning and AI industry with degrees from Beijing Jiaotong University and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.
