Mediocrity Magnet Despite dominating the app market, TikTok’s owner is irked that his people didn’t move on artificial intelligence sooner. Liang Rubo, the cofounder of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, told employees in a company-wide meeting attended by workers from all over the world that they should have been paying more attention to AI as it grew into the giant disruptor it now is, as the company explained in posts on WeChat, a messaging app it owns similar to WhatsApp or Telegram. Because they missed the boat, the company is now risking “mediocrity,” the owner warned. “Our company is not sensitive enough (to new technologies),” Liang said, per Reuters’ translation of the posts. “For example, discussions about [OpenAI’s] GPT did not appear in our half-year tech review until 2023, although GPT-1 was already released in 2018.” Be that as it may, the company’s lateness to the AI game didn’t preclude it from asking forgiveness rather than permission. In December, The Verge revealed that ByteDance had secretly been using OpenAI’s software to build its own large language model (LLM), and although it argued that the usage was justified, OpenAI suspended the company’s account pending investigation all the same. Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger In his remarks, Liang went on to claim that the company’s rapid expansion in recent years had actually hindered its ability to innovate, citing internal red tape that makes projects drag on that would be easier for a smaller startup. “For many good startup teams, they are very familiar with…TikTok’s Owner Seethes That It Missed the Boat on AI