Reportedly, the organisation intends to hire up to 100 additional employees within its Seed artificial intelligence division.
According to Bloomberg, Chinese technology giant ByteDance has announced plans to employ up to 100 new people in 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 division with 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. Those in the regulatory space in the US have long argued that there is potential for ByteDance to use TikTok in the collection of its citizens’ private, valuable data or in the spreading of a narrative in favour of Beijing’s leadership via the app’s algorithm.
Last month, after a long period of deliberation, stalling and false starts, ByteDance and representatives in the US reached a deal wherein the organisation would create an entity for US TikTok operations – with non-Chinese majority owners – as a means of addressing some of the pressing security concerns.
As noted by Bloomberg, many know ByteDance solely in the context of popular social media platform TikTok; however, it also operates as a well-known AI company in China, offering chatbot app Doubao, AI video generation model Seedance 2.0, and image generation mode, 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.
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