Doubao options: 13 bucks; Seed has 2,000 people getting competitively and recklessly stuck into each other; with Tencent and DeepSeek both poaching from both sides, this talent war is even more thrilling than model iteration.

ByteDance for the first time links options to a single business unit, issuing low-priced “special-stock subscription rights” named Doubao to AI Seed Laboratory employees. The current price is $13, up about 30% from the end of 2025, indicating the commercialization of large models and improvements in performance. The Seed team has nearly 2,000 people; internal bureaucratization and fragmented responsibilities exist. Tencent is using former OpenAI researchers to accelerate targeted poaching, and some Seed members have already switched jobs. DeepSeek is also facing talent competition, and ByteDance previously poached some of its core members.