ByteDance has banned knowledge distillation at its AI research division, Seed. This practice, which involves training a smaller model to mimic the outputs of a more powerful one, is widespread among other Chinese AI labs. The company’s stated goal is to reach global top-tier or state-of-the-art standards with its models. Its video generation model Seedance, developed without distillation, already powers the conversational AI assistant Doubao and the video editing tool CapCut. Against a backdrop of US-China tech rivalry marked by chip export restrictions, this independent development strategy aims to produce more competitive and better protected technology.
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