Reportedly, the organisation intends to employ up to 100 additional employees within its artificial intelligence teams, in order to ‘compete with leading US companies’.
According to Bloomberg, Chinese technology giant ByteDance has announced plans to employ up to 100 new people to its artificial intelligence (AI) division as a means of competing with some of the world’s leading US-based AI companies.
The positions open to US-based professionals will be in Seed, which is ByteDance’s AI team and has several global laboratories, in the US, Singapore and China.
Vacancies will be across various responsibilities and will include work in producing international data for ByteDance’s large language models, advancing its popular text, image and video generation tools, completing research to develop ‘human-like’ AI and building science models that enable the organisation to pursue drug discovery and design.
ByteDance’s announcement comes despite significant concerns from US lawmakers and regulators around national security. Lawmakers and those in the regulatory space in the US have long argued that there is potential for ByteDance to use TikTok in the collection of citizen’s private, valuable data or in the spreading of a narrative in favour of Beijing’s leadership, via the app’s algorithm.
Previously, after a long period of deliberation, stopping and stalling, ByteDance and representatives in the US reached a deal wherein the organisation would sell parts of its US TikTok operations to non-Chinese owners, as a means of addressing some of the pressing security concerns.
As noted by Bloomberg, many know ByteDance solely in context to popular social media platform TikTok, however, it also operates as a well-known AI company in China, having launched a chatbot app Doubao, a new AI video generation model, Seedance 2.0 and image generation model, Seedream 5.0.
Earlier this week (16 February) ByteDance promised to “strengthen current safeguards” against intellectual property theft after Disney threatened legal action regarding videos generated by Seedance 2.0.
Via a cease and desist letter, Disney claimed that Seedance 2.0 operates a “pirated library” of Disney assets, taken from its biggest franchises. The company accused ByteDance of using its proprietary content assets as if they were in the public domain.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
