ByteDance is training an AI model that could approach the size of Anthropic’s most cutting-edge Mythos system, as Chinese companies continue to narrow the gap with the top US labs.
The Chinese tech giant is at an early stage of training a model with as many as 10 trillion parameters—three times larger than Moonshot’s Kimi K3, the biggest Chinese model released to date, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
The ByteDance model is being pre-trained—a stage that typically takes three to six months—before it is fine-tuned and released if all goes well, one of the people said. The exact model size would only be determined at a later stage.
Anthropic doesn’t disclose the size of its models, but industry estimates say its most advanced Mythos 5 has about 8 trillion parameters and Fable 5 about 5 trillion. While parameter count sets the fundamental capacity or memory limits for the models to store information, actual capability also depends on other factors, such as data quality and training methods.
ByteDance’s efforts to train one of the world’s largest AI models show Chinese labs’ ambition to not only catch up but outperform their US peers in the most advanced level of AI.
In the past weeks alone, Chinese models from Moonshot and Alibaba show strong performance on benchmarks, lagging behind only Anthropic’s Fable 5 in certain areas. Mythos 5, Anthropic’s most advanced model, is only available to approved organizations after a temporary ban in June due to security concerns.
Industry insiders say multiple Chinese labs are in the process of training models of the size of Fable 5, while ByteDance is currently the most ambitious in pushing for the largest.