The competition in large models has become intense. Zhang Yiming stated: ByteDance "refuses to distill."

In the current heated AI competition, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming has made a rare public statement. On August 6, a reporter from The Paper learned from insiders at ByteDance that the rapid development of domestic competitors' open-source models this year has exerted greater pressure on the company. During a recent internal meeting, Zhang Yiming expressed that building models should adhere to long-termism and delayed gratification, rather than trading others' outputs for a temporary ranking on the list. Since the beginning of this year, competition for AI large models in China has been extremely fierce, with new models being released almost every few days. Each time a powerful new open-source model is launched, internal discussions at ByteDance regarding distillation become more heated. Reports indicate that Zhang Yiming rarely speaks at Seed team meetings, but this time he clearly stated that ByteDance "should be willing to sacrifice some short-term profits for long-term goals." It is understood that ByteDance strictly prohibits the distillation of open-source models internally, even reinforcing relevant restrictions through measures such as API detection. Zhang Yiming believes that distillation will interfere with genuine long-term technological breakthroughs.