TikTok is not advancing in the field of Artificial Intelligence at the pace that ByteDance, its parent company, would like for the growth of the application. The CEO of the company has been the one who has shared these statements, thus giving a reprimand to the subsidiary company for showing a late interest in the possibilities offered by Artificial Intelligence.
With this, everything points to the fact that ByteDance wants its companies to also fish in the turbulent waters that exist now in Artificial Intelligence, where all the big tech companies are trying to get their share to gain space in an emerging field that, at first glance, is economically promising for corporations.
Limited progress in AI
As reported by Neowin, the CEO of ByteDance, Liang Rubo, has been critical of the lack of interest shown by one of its most important subsidiaries, TikTok, in Artificial Intelligence as a technology. In fact, the leader highlights that it was not until 2023 that the company began to value and invest time in researching this technological area, despite the fact that generative AI models began to be publicly displayed in 2018, using GPT-1 as an example.
TikTok, however, has not made any statements about it, stating that, for example, they have indeed launched chatbots focused on various markets, and affirming that this area of development has always been part of their plans, to a greater or lesser extent, even though it had never been among their top priorities.
TikTok’s plans
While it is true that TikTok has not shown much interest in Artificial Intelligence, it is also true that, considering that it is currently the most viral application among all social networks that exist today, it does not really need advancements with any kind of urgency. That is why they have not started to closely examine these advances until 2023.
However, that doesn’t mean TikTok is sitting idle, as they continue to implement improvements and strive to maintain the same strong content moderation while their traffic keeps growing. As a result, for example, they have made improvements for landscape interfaces such as tablets or foldable smartphones. They have also recently announced layoffs, although the number is not as significant (around 60 employees) compared to the thousands of layoffs that other technology companies have carried out, so their workforce reductions have been much more moderate.
