ByteDance Builds China's Largest AI Model at 10T Parameters

ByteDance is building an AI model with as many as ten trillion parameters, according to the Financial Times, which would make it the largest system under development in China by a wide margin. For comparison, Moonshot's Kimi K3, currently the country's biggest model, tops out at roughly a third of that size. A model in that range would also put ByteDance closer to Anthropic's Mythos 5, which outside estimates peg at around eight trillion parameters, though Anthropic has never confirmed the figure.

Three people familiar with the project told the FT the model is still in pretraining, the stage where a system absorbs raw data before fine-tuning begins. That phase usually runs three to six months, meaning ByteDance's model likely won't be ready for release anytime soon. Parameter count alone doesn't decide how good a model is, since data quality and training technique matter just as much, but the scale here is notable given how few companies, in China or elsewhere, have attempted models this large. ByteDance's TikTok ownership and deep pockets make the effort one to watch closely as the pretraining window plays out.