ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming stated at last month’s all-hands meeting of the Seed team that the company will not treat distillation as a shortcut to catch up with large models, even if it means falling temporarily behind domestic competitors. Distillation enables a new model to learn from the outputs of a stronger model, saving training time and computational resources. ByteDance internally acknowledges that without this approach, Seed's language model will struggle to catch up with DeepSeek, Kimi, and Qwen in the short term. What ByteDance truly fears is not a technological gap, but political risk. TikTok has long been under scrutiny by the U.S. government, and if accused of extensively extracting capabilities from American frontier models, Washington may renew its pressure. Previously, Anthropic named DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax, Zhipu, and Alibaba for extensively extracting Claude's capabilities, but did not mention ByteDance. Zhang Yiming rejected distillation not because he values his reputation more than others, but because the money saved through distillation is far outweighed by the potential troubles it could bring. For other Chinese AI companies, distillation is an accelerator; for ByteDance, it’s a liability.