ByteDance reportedly readies a Muse-like AI assistant for release within weeks

ByteDance is preparing an AI assistant similar to Meta’s Muse for release in the coming weeks, Bloomberg reported on November 11. The near-term product push comes with a longer research horizon: co-founder Zhang Yiming reportedly told staff that competing with OpenAI and Anthropic at the cutting edge could take until 2029 or 2030.

The report draws on people familiar with a recent all-hands meeting of ByteDance’s AI team.

The September product behind the comparison

Meta introduced Muse on September 8, describing a personal AI agent that takes on tasks and projects rather than simply answering questions.

According to Meta, Muse can work across apps a person connects, open a browser and fill out forms. People can give it instructions through its own app or WhatsApp. The company also says it can turn a longer-term goal into a plan and advance the work without requiring a new instruction for every step.

At the staff meeting, a longer research timetable

Zhang also reportedly identified a gap in training data. ByteDance’s Seed language models are pretrained on datasets orders of magnitude smaller than those of its frontier competitors, he told staff. Pretraining is the model’s initial training stage; his comparison concerns the scale of the material used there, rather than a measured result for the planned assistant.

The release still awaits confirmation

Whether ByteDance will pair its assistant with hardware is unclear.

A ByteDance spokesperson did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment, according to The Next Web. No exact release date is confirmed.