# ByteDance Training 10-Trillion Parameter Model to Rival Anthropic's Mythos

> ByteDance is quietly building a frontier model estimated at around 10 trillion parameters, roughly three times the size of China's current largest released model, Moonshot's Kimi K3. The stated goal is to rival Anthropic's Mythos, thought to sit near 8 trillion parameters, and to keep ByteDance in the top tier rather than trailing it. The project is early, in a pre-training phase expected to run three to six months before completion, with the final size to be locked in later ahead of fine-tuning and any release. Notably, founder Zhang Yiming reportedly told the team to build genuine capabilities from scratch rather than lean on distilling other models, a pointed choice given how common distillation has become. The move underlines how much of the frontier race is now happening in China, and how ByteDance, better known for TikTok's recommender than for foundation models, wants a seat at the largest-scale table.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: The Next Web · Published Wednesday, August 19, 2026_

## Wortins' read

ByteDance is quietly building a frontier model estimated at around 10 trillion parameters, roughly three times the size of China's current largest released model, Moonshot's Kimi K3. The stated goal is to rival Anthropic's Mythos, thought to sit near 8 trillion parameters, and to keep ByteDance in the top tier rather than trailing it. The project is early, in a pre-training phase expected to run three to six months before completion, with the final size to be locked in later ahead of fine-tuning and any release. Notably, founder Zhang Yiming reportedly told the team to build genuine capabilities from scratch rather than lean on distilling other models, a pointed choice given how common distillation has become. The move underlines how much of the frontier race is now happening in China, and how ByteDance, better known for TikTok's recommender than for foundation models, wants a seat at the largest-scale table.

## Source

[Read the full story at The Next Web](https://thenextweb.com/news/bytedance-10-trillion-parameter-model-mythos)

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