ByteDance goes big with a massive new AI rival to Mythos
The ByteDance model is currently undergoing pre-training, FT reports.
Photo by REUTERS/Aly Song.
- ByteDance is currently pre-training a massive AI model featuring up to 10 trillion parameters.
- The new model could match the scale of Anthropic’s advanced US system, Mythos 5.
- At 10 trillion parameters, ByteDance’s system would be over triple the size of Kimi K3.
- Pre-training for the ByteDance model is expected to take between three and six months.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
ByteDance is training an AI model with as many as 10 trillion parameters that could be close to the size of Anthropic’s cutting-edge Mythos system, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
With 10 trillion parameters, the model would be more than 3 times the size of Chinese startup Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, which has 2.8 trillion parameters.
An AI model's parameters refer to the numerical settings a model learns from data to recognize patterns, generate answers, and carry out tasks. They are often used as a rough measure of scale, though not necessarily capability.
Reuters could not immediately verify the report. ByteDance did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment.
Before Kimi K3's release, Meituan's LongCat-2.0 and DeepSeek's V4-Pro led China's AI industry with 1.6 trillion total parameters, while several other domestic rivals have passed the trillion-parameter threshold.
But direct comparisons with leading US AI models are difficult because companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI do not disclose the parameter counts for systems including Fable, Mythos or GPT-5.5.
According to FT, industry estimates say Anthropic's most advanced Mythos 5 has about 8 trillion parameters and Fable 5 about 5 trillion, making ByteDance's new AI model close to the size of Mythos.
The news comes as Chinese tech firms continue to accelerate their model release cycles to keep up with the intensifying global AI race, battling with US rivals to build more powerful systems without making them prohibitively expensive to run.
The ByteDance model is currently undergoing pre-training, a process that typically lasts 3 to 6 months, before it can be fine-tuned and released, the FT report said.
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