A new decade from ByteDance(Chinese: 字节跳动) 2023 will be planned to embrace the infinite possibilities brought by AGI.
Recently, Zhang Yiming, founder and former CEO of ByteDance, gave a public speech highlighting the profound impact AGI may have on human productive life and said he will continue to lead Bytedance to study AGI in-depth and provide new growth points for the company's Tiktok/Douyin and other products.
Here are the contents of his public speeches.
Hello everyone, I'm YiMing. In 2021, I parted ways with ByteDance. Although I continued to be involved in operational affairs related to the growing challenges of the Feishu business unit and the compliance issues of Douyin Education, most of my energy has been focused on researching and transforming organizational development, leadership, and management practices.
In addition, I have also invested with friends in many undisclosed philanthropic, educational, and medical projects, which are the visions, passions, and ideals I wanted to realize since the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. I am fortunate that ByteDance, friends, and family have provided me with support for these endeavors.
Originally, I thought I could say goodbye to the public eye and influence China's social and educational landscape more diversely and potentially. However, on November 30, 2022, a "singular event" occurred in the field of technology entrepreneurship that cannot be ignored by the media, tech circles, or venture capital circles - OpenAI invested billions of dollars in the research and development of ChatGPT based on the GPT3.5 model, which has now become the next consumer-grade social infrastructure after 150 days of evolution. We are currently witnessing the release of the Plugins application store for GPT4, and we are witnessing the innovation in the AGI field led by OpenAI, just like what Steve Jobs did with the iPhone back then.
ByteDance cannot miss AGI, just like any other Chinese internet company cannot miss AGI. In 2010, when I founded Toutiao, I was well-versed in Professor Clayton Christensen's theory of "disruptive innovation" and Peter F. Drucker's discussions on self-management of knowledge workers, which are topics that have interested me and have been frequently discussed with entrepreneurs over the years.
I judge that AGI can solve the challenges of the second curve of organizational growth. Facebook (now Meta) is a startup organization that I highly respect and admire, and Netflix's culture handbook has also had a great impact on me. ByteDance's Day One philosophy has been influenced by the values of Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, and OpenAI, founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, is a top organization in Silicon Valley and even worldwide that cannot be overlooked.
The Internet revolution has deeply influenced the world, and the growth of organizations rooted in Internet infrastructure has been facilitated by AGI. Behind AGI are cloud computing, big data, deep learning, and machine learning. The frontier fields of computer science and artificial intelligence are witnessing the emergence of new people and things, as well as familiar figures.
Wang Xing is not only my fellow townsman and friend but also my entrepreneurial partner. Wang Huiwen and Wang Xing previously planned to build AGI products in China, and Wang Xiaochuan, the CEO of Sogou, has established Baichuan Intelligence intending to build new open-source infrastructure for OpenAI in China. Baidu has accumulated years of investment and released Wenxin Yiyuan, while Alibaba released Tongyi Qianwen in just three years of cloud computing, and China's AGI entrepreneurship has been surging, calling for more aspiring individuals from home and abroad to join.
Huawei is a great technology organization, and its research and commercialization of 5G infrastructure is not only the pride of the Chinese nation but also the world. Now they are researching "Hunyuan" AI. Mr. Ren Zhengfei has also publicly shared his determination to invest in AI multiple times within the company, and his future vision of open-sourcing the underlying technology architecture aligns with my ideas.
Open source is the belief of all technology idealists. Productization, commercialization, and sustainable growth are challenges for all entrepreneurs.
How to strike a delicate balance between efficiency, user experience, and sustainability, and solve challenges at different stages is a question I have been researching and exploring.
ByteDance has embraced AI since 2015, and now we need to embrace AGI comprehensively.
TikTok and Douyin have gained popularity globally, and as product developers and operators, we should be happy about it. However, we still need to think about sustainable and effective solutions for the international growth of Chinese technology products.
Regardless of the answer, I am convinced that AGI is an indispensable partner for TikTok to discover new growth opportunities globally. Entrepreneurial innovation in the field of AGI has entered a new era of exploration.
My vision is that in the future, anyone can create a 24-hour state of flow through TikTok, from educational learning to lifestyle entertainment to organizational collaboration. AGI can help TikTok achieve personalized learning path planning, lifestyle experience, and product operation building for users. More importantly, AGI will become the underlying architecture and infrastructure for all ByteDance applications, which will help us continue to create better products.
However, the reality is that the self-developed volcano computing engine by ByteDance can only support the operation and development of Douyin, and the average user duration and experience of Douyin are still lower than those of Meta, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and other overseas platforms. The daily active users of Feishu are still one or two orders of magnitude lower than those of DingTalk and WeChat Work. Douyin has not yet released any consumer-level product or service that can rival GPT-4...
Once I shared in my speech on ByteDance's 7th anniversary: "Empathy is the foundation, imagination is the sky, and logic tools are in between." Empathy first requires sensitivity to one's feelings, and then understanding others through self-experience. Imagination is the deduction based on empathy. Logic and tools ensure that induction and deduction do not deviate.
Choosing to do the right thing, not just the easy thing - Turning those theoretically possible but not yet realized things from imagination into reality. The only way to predict the future is to create it. This is the romance and pragmatism of technology idealists.