TikTok owner ByteDance could use a home source to develop a new AI model

TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance plans to develop an AI model trained primarily by chips from its homemaker Huawei Technologies, three people familiar with the matter said, as U.S. curbs turn to the social media giant at home for chips.

ByteDance has diversified into domestic suppliers of chips used in artificial intelligence and accelerated its development since the US in 2022 began restricting exports of advanced AI chips like market leader Nvidia.

AI has become a pillar in the technology industry and firms in various fields such as differentiated offerings in games and e-commerce through the integration of custom AI models – programs that use pattern recognition to make decisions.

ByteDance’s next step in the AI ​​race is to use Huawei’s Ascend 910B chip to train an AI model for a large language, the people said, declining to be identified as the plan is confidential.

The fourth person also said that ByteDance is planning a new AI model but could not say whether it will use Huawei chips.

ByteDance already uses the Ascend 910B primarily for more complex inference tasks, involving pre-trained AI models that make predictions, three people and a different source.

Training AI models is very demanding and requires a large amount of data, which requires the use of high-performance chips such as Nvidia’s premium graphics processing units.

The power and complexity of the new model, measured by its computing parameters, will be less powerful than ByteDance’s existing Doubao AI model, one of the people said.

“This whole story is wrong. There is no new model under construction,” said ByteDance spokesperson Michael Hughes.

Huawei did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Strong supply

ByteDance ordered more than 100,000 Ascend 910B chips this year but has received less than 30,000 since July, a pace too slow to meet the company’s needs, one of the people said.

Limited supply and relatively limited computing power for Nvidia’s China-sourced chips have prevented ByteDance from setting a timeline for the new model, two of the people said.

ByteDance’s current AI technology is used in its flagship large language model launched in August 2023 and rebranded as the chatbot Doubao, and in many other applications including the text-to-video tool Jimeng. It launched two video-focused Doubao models this month to compete with OpenAI.

The use of such apps has grown since the beginning of this year, with ByteDance’s chatbot becoming one of the most popular apps in China with more than 10 million monthly active users.

The increased emphasis on AI has made ByteDance one of the biggest buyers of Huawei’s AI chips, the three people said.

It is also a major buyer of Nvidia’s H20 AI chip, which the American chipmaker is making for the Chinese market in response to trade restrictions, two of the people said. The TikTok owner is also Microsoft’s biggest client in Asia for Nvidia chips accessible through cloud computing, two separate sources said.

Reuters previously reported that ByteDance spent $2 billion on Nvidia chips last year.

Nvidia declined to comment. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

(This story has been edited to correct the attribution and location of ByteDance to Michael Hughes, in section 9)

– Reuters