At the end of 2025, during a dinner with the model team, Zeng Yan, head of the Seedance model, told her manager that she still wanted to try training a larger model, at least one with 200 billion parameters.
Zeng is a young researcher on ByteDance’s Seed team. She joined the company as a campus hire in 2021, and her research has focused on video understanding and generation. “She has always had strong technical judgment,” someone who has worked with Zeng told 36Kr. “She is also proactive. When she believes in something, she is quite persistent and will find ways to fight for the resources to make it happen.”
That assessment closely captures Zeng’s situation during the training of Seedance 2.0. “She wanted to train a model with more parameters, but there were disagreements within the team at the time. Some people thought scaling the model directly to the 200–300-billion level was a bit aggressive. Training resources were also tight, so they thought it might be safer to train a model at around the 100-billion level first,” a person familiar with the matter told 36Kr.
The person said a senior executive happened to attend the dinner. After learning of Zeng’s idea, the executive said resources could be coordinated for the training of Seedance 2.0. “Later, at Seed’s final formal internal review meeting, Seed head Wu Yonghui and Zhou Chang, who leads visual multimodal generation, discussed it and ultimately chose to support Zeng’s idea.”
