According to media reports, ByteDance is increasing its investment in foundational research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Its Doubao large model team has internally formed a long-term AGI research team codenamed "Seed Edge." This team aims to explore longer-term, uncertain, and bold AGI research topics, reflecting ByteDance's strategic commitment to AI.
It has been disclosed that the "Seed Edge" team has preliminarily identified five major research directions, including exploring the boundaries of reasoning abilities, exploring the boundaries of perception abilities, investigating next-generation model design that integrates hardware and software, exploring next-generation AI learning paradigms, and examining the next scaling direction. This indicates that ByteDance's layout in AGI goes beyond just application levels and delves deeply into fundamental theories and technology development.
Despite industry debates on whether to continue investing in AI pre-training and foundational research, ByteDance has chosen to double down on fundamental large model research with unprecedented strategic determination, including providing ample computing resources, widely recruiting top research talent, and creating a long-term research environment. Last May, the Doubao large model team launched the "Top Seed Talent Program," recruiting top PhD graduates globally with highly competitive compensation.
Within just a few months of its establishment, the Doubao large model team has published 57 papers at top conferences such as ICLR, CVPR, and NeurIPS, with research achievements including open-source projects with over a million downloads and a ten-thousand-star project on GitHub. Additionally, the team has collaborated with nearly 20 universities, including the establishment of joint AI laboratories with Tsinghua University's AIR and Peking University. These initiatives showcase ByteDance's strength and determination in the field of foundational AI research.
ByteDance's actions indicate that its goal is not merely to become a company that applies AI, but to make significant breakthroughs in AI technology fundamentals, laying the groundwork for the future development of AGI.
