ByteDance Readies Muse-Like AI Assistant; Zhang Sees Frontier Catch-Up by 2029 at Earliest

What happened

The new assistant will support voice interaction and an animated avatar and handle tasks on the user's behalf, modelled on Meta's Muse, launched in September, according to the report. Codenamed "Spell" internally, it has been in internal testing since April and is now planned for deeper integration with Doubao. The product name, exact launch date and whether it will ship with hardware have not been disclosed, and ByteDance did not respond to requests for comment.

The plan was laid out by Zhang Yiming at an all-hands meeting of the company's AI team. The Seed team now has about 1,000 researchers and engineers, led by Wu Yonghui, who joined from Google DeepMind in 2025. Zhang told the meeting that the pre-training datasets for ByteDance's Seed language models are orders of magnitude smaller than those of top rivals; Doubao is China's largest AI chat app by users, with about 324 million monthly active users.

ByteDance plans to invest up to $70 billion in its Seedance video AI platform, according to reports. Seed 2.1, the latest generation of the Seed model family, was released on June 23, and no new generation has followed in the 142 days since. Meta's Muse launched in September as a voice assistant with an animated avatar, distributed through devices including smart glasses; ByteDance has introduced virtual shares tied to the Doubao business, called "Doubao Shares."

Key facts

1. New assistant: Reported launch in the coming weeks, with voice interaction, an animated avatar and task delegation; codenamed "Spell", in internal testing since April
2. Integration: Planned for deeper integration with Doubao; name, launch date and hardware plans undisclosed
3. Timeline: Zhang says catching up with OpenAI and Anthropic at the frontier will take until 2029 or 2030 at the earliest
4. Gap: Seed models' pre-training datasets are orders of magnitude smaller than top rivals'; the Seed team has about 1,000 people
5. Scale: Doubao has about 324 million monthly active users, China's largest AI chat app; ByteDance reportedly plans up to $70 billion for Seedance