Caixin reported that ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo told a companywide meeting the firm's large language models have fallen further behind leading overseas systems, even as Doubao stays competitive and Seedance sits at the video frontier. Liang said ByteDance will keep developing its own foundation models rather than chase short-term rankings with outside models, accepting a temporary lag to harden the long-term stack. The stance matches founder Zhang Yiming's delayed-gratification line against distillation shortcuts. For China's model race, it is a rare admission from inside a top lab. Caveat: the account relies on people familiar with a closed meeting, not an official transcript.