ByteDance is early in pre-training a foundation model that could reach 10 trillion parameters, about three times Moonshot's Kimi K3, people familiar with the project told the Financial Times via Ars Technica. Estimates put Anthropic's Mythos 5 near 8 trillion, so Seed is chasing the top of the size race rather than a distillation shortcut. Founder Zhang Yiming has told staff to aim for world-leading capability even if near-term rankings slip. Why it matters: China's largest consumer AI player is betting compute and patience over copycat shortcuts. Caveat: final size is not locked, release is months away if training holds, and ByteDance did not comment.