Ex-ByteDance intern Tian Keyu's secretive world-model lab reportedly raises at $200M valuation

Tian Keyu, the Peking University PhD student known as the "ByteDance poisoning intern," has a 10-person world-model lab valued at $200 million after $30 million from Fivesource Capital and IDG, according to Leiphone.

The lab plans to train a foundation model on about 100 million hours of video using a 200,000-symbol visual vocabulary, with a 2027 release targeted. Tian says the approach could cut the cost of generating one second of video by at least an order of magnitude.