ByteDance CEO complains company risks mediocrity by missing AI wave

ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo was just the latest to fret about being left behind according to excerpts from his speech posted on the company’s WeChat account. Liang complained that employees were “not sensitive enough to external changes” and griped that staff only started talking about ChatGPT, the buzzy chatbot developed by OpenAI that sparked the AI boom, in 2023.

Liang warned that inefficiencies and a lack of speed would make ByteDance a “mediocre organization.” He cited one instance where a task was initially forecast to take 1,000 man-days to complete, a timeframe that was reduced to just 15 man-days after an in-depth review.

Much like in the U.S., China’s tech sector is in the midst of its own race to adopt generative AI. The most prominent effort is from Baidu and its ERNIE chatbot, which the tech firm claims is as good as OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. But Alibaba, Tencent, JD, and an array of Chinese startups are all launching their own AI services.

ByteDance launched its own chatbot, Doubao, in August last year. The Verge reported in mid-December that ByteDance was using OpenAI’s technology to train its own chatbot, violating OpenAI’s terms of service. OpenAI has since suspended ByteDance’s account.

Liang is the second Chinese tech CEO to complain about employees this week.

On Monday, Tencent CEO and co-founder Pony Ma told staff that the company’s video game business “achieved nothing” last year. He complained that Tencent’s new games did not perform as well as expected, reports Reuters. While Tencent’s staple hits like Honor of…