ByteDance develops AI model with 10 trillion parameters

ByteDance, the Chinese technology company that owns TikTok, is developing a new artificial intelligence model with up to 10 trillion parameters, according to a report published on Friday, August 7, 2026. The development places the company among the very few firms globally working on AI systems of this immense scale.

The model, if built to its reported size, would be more than three times larger than the current largest known Chinese model, Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, which has 2.8 trillion parameters. It would also bring ByteDance's system close in scale to Anthropic's advanced Mythos 5 model, which industry estimates place at around eight trillion parameters. Parameters are the numerical settings an AI model learns from data to recognize patterns and perform tasks, and they serve as a common, though imperfect, measure of a model's scale and complexity.

The project is currently in the pretraining phase, a foundational stage of development that typically lasts between three to six months, according to sources familiar with the matter. Following this phase, the model would undergo fine-tuning before any potential release. The exact final size of the model may be determined later in the...