But in China, about 700 million use the domestic version, Douyin, and 300 million scroll the headlines on Toutiao, a news app. Every video that ByteDance’s users watch or post gives the company another data point about how people use the internet. For years, ByteDance has applied that wealth of information to make its apps more appealing, improving its ability to recommend content to keep users hooked. ByteDance Ltd. is an internet technology company founded by Zhang Yiming, and it is well-known for developing video sharing platform TikTok. But when it launched TikTok, the ByteDance entered the Unicorn family.
It was China’s most popular chatbot, beating rivals made by Baidu and Alibaba-backed Moonshot, until the start-up DeepSeek released its own in 2025. While these Chinese-made chips cannot do everything the Nvidia chips can do, they work well enough to help companies like ByteDance provide AI services to people and businesses in China. Chinese tech companies have been “encouraged to adopt local options” for buying mergers and acquisitions for dummies by bill snow chips, said Mr Lian Jye Su, an analyst at Omdia, a market research firm. The Chinese commerce ministry published rules in 2020 that added “civilian use” to a list of technologies that are restricted for export. It has also said that Douyin employees do not have access to TikTok’s US user data.
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Most waited until the following month to restore access, however, fearing repercussions. Under the federal legislation, companies could be fined $5,000 per user they help access TikTok. For companies like Google and Apple, this could mean a $5,000 fine for each user who downloads or updates TikTok. In late January, TikTok went dark for a little more than 12 hours in the United States after the app was effectively banned under federal legislation. U.S. internet hosting services made TikTok unavailable to access and app stores removed the app for download.
Products
TikTok is an app platform that allows users to post short-form videos and share content from their cell phones. TikTok uses advanced algorithmic methods to predict which videos users will enjoy and thus create a personalized assortment of videos for them to peruse on their “For You” page (FYP). The first product the group produced was the app Neihan Duanzi (“profound gags”), which allowed users to share jokes and memes. This was followed by the news aggregator app Toutiao, which used machine and deep learning algorithms to deliver a personalized news feed to users. Toutiao became an early flagship of ByteDance and continues to have more than 300 million monthly active users. The company also developed the Indian social media app Hello, as well as the popular Indonesian news aggregator Baca Berita (BaBe).
The results nearly speak for themselves, with Seed-Thinking-v1.5 outperforming interactive brokers DeepSeek R1 and approaching Google’s newly released Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI’s o3-mini-high reasoner on many third-party benchmark evaluations. It even exceeds those two in the case of the ARC-AGI benchmark, which measures progress towards artificial general intelligence, seen as the goal or “Holy Grail” of AI. This model outperforms humans on most economically valuable tasks, according to OpenAI’s definition.
China
ByteDance showed how closely connected its app ecosystem is with its AI efforts when it recently started allowing some users to chat with Doubao inside the Douyin app. Concern over how ByteDance uses data has driven lawmakers in Washington to try to force a sale of TikTok’s US operations. On April 4, US President Donald Trump extended a looming deadline by 75 days into mid-June. In 2020, TikTok was among hundreds of Chinese apps barred in India after deadly clashes on the country’s border with China. These concerns have been echoed by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies — including by the FBI director this week — as well as regulators elsewhere.
It also has others like TopBuzz, a platform that recommends trending videos and articles to users, and BaBe, a news aggregation app in Indonesia. The Chinese giant is now one of the most valuable private technology firms in the world, reportedly worth $75 billion, and owns a variety of apps from news aggregators to social media services. ByteDance’s journey started in 2012, when entrepreneur Zhang Yiming envisioned an AI-powered content discovery platform that would personalize content for users based on their interests.
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ByteDance launched TikTok in 2017, and the app took the world by storm, crossing a billion users in four years. ByteDance has rocketed in recent years to become one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth around $225 billion, according to market intelligence firm CP Insights. Telegram Messenger is a globally accessible cross-platform, freemium, cloud-based, encrypted, and centralized instant messaging service. Different companies have different individual values that they try to encourage to focus on, and this is what makes the people’s unique strengths stronger.
In July 2018, ByteDance said Douyin and TikTok had 500 million monthly average users (MAUs). That number could now be higher because the company said in January that Douyin alone had 500 million MAUs in China. Increased regulatory barriers were also introduced against the company because of tensions between the United States and China.
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In 2024, the company spent roughly US$11 billion (S$14.5 billion) on infrastructure like data centres, networking equipment and computer chips, according to a report by Zheshang Securities, a Chinese financial firm. “ByteDance has all this data, all the time, from millions of users,” said Ms Wei Sun, a principal analyst in AI. ByteDance is also using the data as the linchpin of a growing business in artificial intelligence (AI).
- TikTok’s popularity also increased considerably during the COVID-19 pandemic, as millions of housebound social media users turned to their phones for entertainment.
- US trading firm Susquehanna reportedly owns 15% of TikTok-owner ByteDance, a stake that is potentially worth more than $15 billion.
- In addition to McCourt, “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have committed to the bid.
- The Trump administration did not immediately respond for comment when contacted by USA TODAY on Friday.
These techniques reduce reward signal sparsity and enhance training stability, especially in long chain-of-thought (CoT) settings. To address saturation in standard benchmarks like AIME, ByteDance introduced BeyondAIME, a new, harder math benchmark with curated problems designed to resist memorization and better discriminate model performance. This and the Codeforces evaluation set are expected to be publicly released to support future research. The Biden administration set up rules to try to keep Chinese companies from getting access to those kinds of chips, particularly ones made by Nvidia, the Silicon Valley giant.
- TikTok is banned from government employees’ work phones in the United States and several other nations including Australia and Canada over security concerns.
- It also has others like TopBuzz, a platform that recommends trending videos and articles to users, and BaBe, a news aggregation app in Indonesia.
- Company job postings show that ByteDance is hiring for hundreds of AI-related roles.
- ByteDance’s breakthrough came in 2016 with the launch of Douyin (抖音), a short-form video platform for the Chinese market.
It essentially combines the capabilities of multiple models into one, each specializing in a different domain. The model is not yet available for download or use, and it’s unclear what the licensing terms will be—whether it will be proprietary/closed source, open source/free for all to use and modify at will, or somewhere in between. However, the technical paper provides some noteworthy details that are worth going over now and in advance of whenever they are made available. It started with the announcement of OpenAI’s o1 model in Sept. 2024, but really took off with the DeepSeek R1 release in Jan. 2025. Government regarding bull flag trading strategy a potential solution for TikTok U.S. An agreement has not been executed. UNO excels in subject-driven generation but has room for improvement in generalization due to dataset constraints.
The platform’s success prompted ByteDance to introduce TikTok to international markets in 2018, rapidly transforming it into a global cultural phenomenon. In one week, on April 5, President Donald Trump’s extension delaying a ban on the short-form video app TikTok will expire. If the app is not divested by its Chinese parent company ByteDance by this deadline, the app could go dark again, as it did in January. The vast majority of images used in this project are either generated or licensed. If you have any concerns, please contact us, and we will promptly remove any inappropriate content. Our code is released under the Apache 2.0 License,, while our models are under the CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
A Chinese state-owned entity owns 1% of Douyin, according to the ByteDance website. TikTok has said this is a requirement under Chinese law and does not impact ByteDance’s international operations. ByteDance’s founders have a 20% stake, and the remainder is held by employees, according to TikTok. Most people probably know ByteDance because of TikTok and its recent clash with the U.S. government and its more recent 75-day reprieve. TikTok avoided another ban in the U.S., which was previously set for April 5.
After three years of working together, both of them, along with other employees, rented an apartment and started working to develop an app. Their aim was to create an app that could classify news according to preference and would be using big data algorithms. The name of that app was Toutiao, and later, they founded ByteDance. This article is a compilation of some important and fascinating facts and figures about ByteDance that you will love to know. TikTok does not have advertising yet, but a January report from online trade magazine Digiday said ByteDance is now starting to test ads on the platform, which could open a new revenue stream internationally. Users can buy virtual currency which they then gift to content creators.