Bytedance Offers Special Stocks to AI Team to Combat Counteroffers from Rivals

According to the Financial Times, ByteDance is combating poaching by competitors by offering special stocks to AI lab Seed employees. This month, the parent company of TikTok opened up the opportunity for global Seed employees to purchase "Dou Bao stocks" at an exercise price of $13 per share.

Sources close to the matter say that this is the first time ByteDance has issued stocks directly linked to a specific business unit. This mechanism allows Seed employees to share directly in the growth of the AI department, avoiding dilution by other business lines within the company.

It is reported that the pricing of these stocks was around $10 per share at the end of last year, and the price had risen by nearly 30% by this month, reflecting the accelerated commercialization of ByteDance's large language models in cloud services, and significant improvements in model performance; insiders also said that compared with other AI labs in China, the current valuation is still at a relatively low level, implying a larger potential for employee returns in the future.

ByteDance's choice to retain talent with special stocks is directly related to the escalating AI talent war among Chinese technology companies. The Financial Times points out that the competition is mainly focused on infrastructure engineers and data labeling talents, positions seen as key to improving the efficiency of AI models under conditions of limited computing power. Recently, several core members of Seed have defected to Tencent, including senior member of the visual AI platform Xiao Xuefeng and infrastructure expert Zhang Chi.

However, this type of equity incentive tied to a single business also has its controversies. The report suggests that it may create internal divisions within the company, weaken cross-team collaboration, and increase the difficulty of talent mobility within the company.