Zhang Yiming
Founder of ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok, Douyin and the Seed AI research team.
Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance in 2012 and built it into one of the largest technology companies in the world, largely on the strength of recommendation algorithms: Douyin in China, TikTok everywhere else. He stepped down as chief executive in 2021 but remains the company’s dominant shareholder and, by most accounts, still sets its long-term direction.
That direction now points hard at AI. ByteDance’s Seed team, roughly 2,000 people, works on language, video and speech models, and Zhang has reportedly told it internally to aim for world-leading model capabilities over the long term rather than chase quick wins. Reports in 2026 placed the company in pretraining on a model of up to ten trillion parameters, which would be the largest ever built in China.