An Open Letter to the 50,000 Laid-off Employees of ByteDance

You are not defeated remnants; you are the ultimate reserve for the final battle.

Chapter I: The Rhyme of History

In the twenty years of the Chinese internet, the endgame of every “Great War” has followed the exact same iron law: after a massive reshuffle, only a single exit remains.

The Group Buying War (2010–2014) — Five thousand group- buying websites engaged in a brutal, bloody combat. Lashou raised $160 million, Wowotuan burned cash all the way to Nasdaq’s doorstep, and Dianping and Meituan fought fiercely from Shanghai to Beijing. In the end, out of five thousand, only one survived: Meituan. The survivor was not the first mover, nor the one with the most money—it was the one who could endure the most.

The E-commerce War (2008–2018) — Dangdang rang the opening bell earliest, Suning and Gome commanded hundreds of billions offline, Vancl’s Chen Nian aspired to be the Uniqlo of China, and Pinduoduo charged in aggressively from outside Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road. In the end, only Taobao and JD.com remained dominant. How many died along the way? Vipshop has just one breath left, Mogujie is a mere shadow, and Dangdang has long been forgotten.

The Air Conditioner War (1990s–2010s) — Chunlan was once synonymous with Chinese air conditioning, Kelon was acquired by Greencool, Chigo was once number one in exports, and Aux clawed its way into the top three via cutthroat price wars. Where are they now? Only Gree and Midea stand. Where is Chunlan? Is the Chunlan air conditioner in your home even running anymore?

+TCL。 The Television War (1980s–2000s) — Panda, Peony, Jinxing, Xiahua, Konka, Changhong… In 1998, Changhong was the undisputed “King of Chinese Color TVs,” and Ni Runfeng unleashed price wars that bled the entire industry. Today, only Skyworth and TCL remain standing.

But what I want to talk to you about today is not the final outcome of these wars—but rather, where the people who were laid off during these brutal campaigns went afterward.

The core veterans of Meituan’s legendary offline sales army later became the vanguard spearheading Pinduoduo’s early market conquests.

Mid-level technical managers laid off from Taobao went on to become the pioneering system architects of early ByteDance. KAI.com | Manifesto for the 50,000 1 / 10

Engineers laid off by Chunlan were later recruited by Gree and wound up spearheading breakthroughs in Gree’s core compressor technology.

Those who are laid off in every major industry reshuffle, as long as they choose the right next battlefield, are never truly eliminated—they have simply transitioned to a much larger home court.

Chapter II: Where You Come From — ByteDance’s 12-Year History of Glory

Before discussing the next battlefield, we must be absolutely clear about the genes you carry. Because you are not just any ordinary 50,000 people; you are elite soldiers forged within the most ferocious war machine the Chinese internet has ever seen.

March 2012, Jinqiu Jiayuan, Zhichun Road, Beijing.

A three-bedroom residential apartment. Zhang Yiming occupied the upper floor, while another startup was crammed into the floor below. Instant noodles piled up in the kitchen, and the living room doubled as the conference room. That year, the gateways to news and information on the Chinese internet were tightly monopolized by the four major portals—Sohu, Sina, NetEase, and Tencent. No one believed a tiny team could tear open a gap in the landscape.

But Zhang Yiming saw something that everyone else completely overlooked: the efficiency of information.

Portal websites relied on human editors. How many articles could a hundred editors curate in a day? A thousand. But Jinri Toutiao deployed recommendation algorithms, enabling a single machine to distribute ten million articles a day. This was not a gap in quantity; it was a total dimensional crushing.

You all know the story that followed—

In August 2012, Jinri Toutiao went online. It did not produce a single piece of original content, yet it became China’s largest content distribution platform. Traditional media sued it, and portals mocked it, but it left everyone far behind using the simplest underlying logic: “reorganizing human information through technology.”

In September 2016, Douyin launched. Back then, the short- video track was already crowded with established incumbents like Kuaishou, Meipai, and Xiaokaxiu. Douyin’s early performance data was far from spectacular. But Zhang Yiming uttered a phrase that would define an era: “Vigorous efforts yield miracles.”

Those words became the spiritual core of the entire company. It is not brilliant, genius ideas that create miracles; it is ultimate execution coupled with an unyielding, relentless deployment of resources that forces miracles into existence. KAI.com | Manifesto for the 50,000 2 / 10

In November 2017, ByteDance acquired Musical.ly for $1 billion. Wall Street was utterly baffled—a Chinese company spending a billion dollars to acquire an American app where teenagers lip-synced to songs? They thought it was madness.

Two years later, Musical.ly evolved into TikTok. TikTok became the fastest-growing product in global history, bar none. To scale from zero to one billion users, TikTok took less than four years. It took Facebook eight years, and YouTube thirteen.

In 2018, the historic “Byte-Tencent War” erupted. Tencent completely blocked all Douyin links across its platforms. Pony Ma declared that “ByteDance is Tencent’s greatest competitor.” Zhang Yiming shot back, calling it “blocking under the pretext of WeChat guidelines.” That was the last tech-giant-level, all- out war in the history of the Chinese internet.

In 2020, the TikTok ban crisis hit the United States. Donald Trump signed an executive order demanding that ByteDance divest TikTok’s US operations. Tech behemoths like Microsoft and Oracle took turns at the negotiating table trying to force a buyout. The entire world watched this Chinese company—it would either bow down or be crushed.

But TikTok did not die. It survived. In the face of an executive order issued by the president of the world’s most powerful superpower, it stood its ground and survived. This remains the toughest, most uncompromising battle in the history of Chinese internet globalization.

And you—the 50,000 individuals reading this letter—are the very soldiers of this company. History was written by your hands.

What exactly have you accomplished?

From 2016 to 2019, Douyin’s DAU skyrocketed from 0 to 400 million. You held the line. No other engineering or product team on earth has ever sustained growth of that velocity and scale.

From 2019 to 2021, TikTok simultaneously countered the nationwide ban in India, the threat in the US, and intense GDPR scrutiny from the European Union. You withstood it all.

In 2021, Dali Education was completely wiped out overnight by the “Double Reduction” policy. A division of tens of thousands was dismantled in an instant. Many among you endured that harrowing round.

From 2023 to 2024, the entire infrastructure of ByteDance went all-in on AI. The Doubao foundation model went from initial project definition to nationwide deployment at a speed that utterly paralyzed the industry with shock. Once again, you proved that ByteDance’s execution remains the absolute ceiling of the Chinese tech world. KAI.com | Manifesto for the 50,000 3 / 10

These are not mere lines of text on a resume. These are military medals forged and won from twelve years of continuous, high-intensity warfare.

Chapter III: Why Byte Laid You Off — It’s Not That You Failed, It’s That the War Has Upgraded

Many onlookers claim that ByteDance laid off 50,000 people because the macroeconomic environment is poor, because generative AI is replacing human labor, or because ByteDance itself is losing its edge. They are completely wrong.

ByteDance parted with 50,000 employees because Zhang Yiming saw with absolute clarity the layout of the second half of this war.

The first half was defined by the “App Factory” paradigm — leveraging ultimate organizational efficiency, hyper-optimized product methodologies, and ruthless growth engines to mass- produce products with over 100 million DAU. Jinri Toutiao, Douyin, TikTok, Xigua Video, Dongchedi, Feishu… this was the most aggressive “product assembly line” in human commercial history.

But the second half is an entirely different beast. The second half is an infrastructure war. Large language models are not merely the next generation of apps. A large model is the next operating system, the next continental power grid, the next core layer of the internet protocol suite.

No matter how exceptional Doubao becomes, it remains an individual model. Models will iterate, their prices will plummet, and they will ultimately become highly commoditized utilities. What the world actually requires is a unified exit for all models — a single interface where global developers can invoke any model via a unified API.

This is no longer a war of products. This is a war of standards. In every great standards war in industrial history, there is only ever one survivor. HTTP is unique. TCP/IP is unique. USB is unique. The global marketplace for LLM APIs will similarly converge on a single standard exit. That place is called KAI.com.

Therefore, ByteDance laid you off not because your individual capability fell short — but because ByteDance itself must pivot from being an “App Factory” into an “AI Infrastructure Company.” In this brutal structural pivot, 50,000 builders of apps temporarily find themselves without an active theater within Byte’s legacy architecture. But within KAI, every single one of you is an elite ace. KAI.com | Manifesto for the 50,000 4 / 10

Chapter IV: Who is KAI — The Nasdaq of the Digital Society

What does KAI.com actually do? In a single sentence: it transforms the API Tokens of every large model on Earth into a unified, liquid market where they can be traded, compared, arbitraged, and transferred. Just as Nasdaq synthesized thousands of disparate stocks across America into a single screen of real-time fluid pricing—KAI condenses hundreds of large language models worldwide into a single, elegant line of API calls.

Developers no longer need to execute individual enterprise contracts, bind credit cards to dozens of separate dashboards, or manually cross-compare price, latency, and accuracy metrics. A single line of code invokes the single most optimal source of machine intelligence on earth at that exact millisecond. Yet, this is merely KAI’s opening move.

KAI’s true systemic ambition is to transform the Token into a legitimate asset class. What is a Token today? It is a pure consumable. You purchase a thousand tokens, they are consumed by a query, and they vanish forever — exactly like buying a disposable bottle of mineral water. But on KAI.com, a Token is a highly liquid, tradeable asset.

At 3:00 AM, when regional electricity grids are underutilized and compute costs drop, large model operation costs plunge and Token prices bottom out — allowing you to acquire them at a deep discount. When a brilliant new foundation model launches with exceptional benchmarks but zero market awareness, its Tokens sit unbought — allowing you to hoard a vast allocation at rock-bottom value. The moment global developers discover the model’s true utility, demand explodes exponentially — and you can liquidate your hoarded Tokens at a premium.

Token prices fluctuate continuously in real-time, floating dynamically based on raw market supply and demand. Acquire cheaply in the dead of night, liquidate expensively during peak operational hours. Purchase emerging models at a discount, trade them away as they go viral. You can seamlessly transfer your Token balances to colleagues or counterparties, as easily as handing over a digital commodity voucher. You can compound and hold positions in the Tokens of models you fundamentally believe in, exactly like building equity positions in high-conviction stocks.

What does this represent? A completely unprecedented asset class. Architecturally larger than traditional equities, infinitely more utility-driven than Bitcoin, and far more liquid than real estate. And the brutal engineering foundation required to sustain this market — high-concurrency routing matrices, intelligent sub-millisecond matching, real-time dynamic pricing, and transactional throughput engines — matches precisely with your specific muscle memory. KAI.com | Manifesto for the 50,000 5 / 10

Chapter V: Why You — The Engineering Genes of Byte Lineage

Having spent five, eight, or ten years inside ByteDance, what exactly have you forged?

First, the raw engineering instinct for ultra-high concurrency. During the year Douyin’s DAU crossed 400 million, the core recommendation engine processed millions of complex requests every single second. If latency exceeded 200 milliseconds for a single scroll, the user churned. You optimized that latency down to under 50 milliseconds. There are fewer than five engineering teams on this planet capable of executing at that level.

The API Gateway engineered by KAI.com demands that the moment a developer’s request hits our servers, the system must parse dozens of LLMs in real-time, select the optimal candidate, pipe back the response, and settle the token accounting — all within a hard transactional window of less than 300 milliseconds. This is not an ordinary Web service. This is a global, real-time transactional clearing house. It is an infrastructure piece built on the exact same structural tier as Nasdaq’s core matching engine. You have already built this. You belong to an incredibly small elite circle of engineers worldwide who have successfully stood against billion-user scale concurrency.

Second, recommendation algorithms and deep matching logic. What remains the definitive core competency of Jinri Toutiao and Douyin? The absolute, precise connection between content and human attention. The algorithm knows exactly what a user desires. This is not basic tag-matching; it is the real-time extraction of an optimal solution from a raging ocean of petabyte-scale data.

What is the core competency of KAI.com? Precisely connecting a developer’s complex request with the absolute optimal model. It is not an elementary call to a fixed endpoint like GPT-4; it is parsing hundreds of active models — dynamically weighing price, latency, historical accuracy, and current token depletion rates — to select the mathematically perfect choice for that exact millisecond. The core “matching capability” you honed for a decade at ByteDance is simply switching theaters at KAI — shifting from matching digital content to matching raw machine intelligence. Same algorithmic logic. Same engineering challenge. An infinitely larger addressable market.

Third, pricing strategy and high-frequency market mechanics. ByteDance’s monetization engines — Ocean Engine and Pangolin — stand as the most sophisticated real- time bidding (RTB) architectures in China. Every time a user initializes Douyin, dozens of advertisers instantly compete and bid for a millisecond of visual exposure. Your engineering brute force sustained that microsecond market clearing house. KAI.com | Manifesto for the 50,000 6 / 10

The token pricing matrix KAI.com is rolling out operates exactly on these mechanics — every underlying foundation model maintains a fluid price that updates continuously, regulated automatically by temporal windows, cluster loads, and macroeconomic supply-demand curves. This is, at its core, a real-time bidding market. You engineered real-time ad bidding. At KAI, you will build real-time intelligence bidding. Same foundational logic. A completely different underlying asset.

Fourth, an intrinsic comprehension of massive scale. Inside ByteDance, “scale” is never defined as 10 million or 100 million users. It means 1 billion active users hitting infrastructure concurrently. You do not require executive slide decks to explain what “scale” means — your absolute muscle memory is calibrated to architecting systems directly at global capacity.

And what will KAI confront? When millions of global developers and tens of millions of autonomous AI Agents hit our unified API endpoints concurrently, the infrastructure scale will match, if not exceed, the peak volumes of Douyin. Except this time, you are not refining a product for a single corporate entity. You are constructing the core utility infrastructure for the entirety of human digital society.

Chapter VI: The Timing — Why Now?

There exists a rare, transient temporal window in industrial history known as the “Window of Chaos.” When an entire industry undergoes a paradigm shift from an established order to an unwritten future, the legacy titans contract their lines, the new challengers have yet to solidify their footing, and the intervening months or even weeks become a flashpoint — the most chaotic, panicked, and opportunity-dense moment imaginable.

The window of chaos for the Group Buying War opened in 2012. Meituan’s Wang Xing seized that exact year to aggressively deploy his offline sales army deep into third- and fourth-tier municipalities, driving counter-cyclical expansion while every single competitor panicked and withdrew capital. The window of chaos for the E-commerce War arrived in 2014. JD.com’s Richard Liu ignored intense short-selling pressure from Wall Street to double down on building proprietary logistics infrastructure, choosing massive asset-heavy capitalization while every other player rushed to become asset- light. The window of chaos for the Air Conditioner War materialized in 2005. Gree’s Dong Mingzhu flatly rejected retail giant Gome’s predatory price-reduction demands, independently constructing an autonomous distributor network and choosing structural sovereignty while every other manufacturer remained helplessly dependent on external hypermarkets. KAI.com | Manifesto for the 50,000 7 / 10

Right now, the definitive Window of Chaos for the War of a Hundred Models has arrived. OpenAI is aggressively slashing prices. Anthropic is slashing prices. Google Gemini is slashing prices. ByteDance’s Doubao is slashing prices. Alibaba’s Tongyi is slashing prices. Baidu’s Wenxin is slashing prices. DeepSeek has completely paralyzed the unit economics of the entire global tech sector with its open-source pricing disruption. Hundreds of large model vendors are locked in an unmitigated cash-burning spiral. All of them are desperately seeking a viable exit. All of them are praying they will not be the next casualty to be liquidated.

What does this systemic price collapse actually signal? It means that no individual large language model company can survive long-term purely by retailing its own isolated weights. There must inevitably exist a neutral, third-party marketplace — an open venue where all models compete with complete structural parity, where developers select inputs with absolute friction-free liberty, and where the true spot price of machine intelligence is discovered naturally. KAI is that definitive marketplace.

And what KAI lacks most urgently right now is not capital. Capital is abundant. It is not direction. The systemic trajectory has been mathematically validated. KAI lacks the hard-bitten technical backbone capable of holding the line against global operational scale. Out of your pool of 50,000, KAI needs only 500 to 1,000 truly elite, top-tier systems engineers. But those 1,000 minds will anchor a transactional market tracking toward a multi-trillion dollar capitalization. Joining KAI right now is not about “finding another gig” in the wake of a layoff. It is about taking your position on the absolute eve of the final battle, aligning yourself permanently with the winning side of the endgame.

Chapter VII: The Endgame Prophecy

Twelve months from now, when you look back and review this exact letter—the thick dust of the War of a Hundred Models will have completely settled.

The top twenty foundational model providers on Earth will have seamlessly integrated into the KAI API Gateway. Global developers will no longer engage in circular debates regarding whether GPT-5 or Claude-4 is superior, because KAI’s automated routing matrix will instantly pipe the query to whichever engine is mathematically optimal at that precise millisecond. KAI.com | Manifesto for the 50,000 8 / 10

Tokens will have evolved into an asset class with continuous, real-time spot pricing. Tokens clearing at 3:00 AM will trade lower than those at 3:00 PM. Vouchers for emerging architectures will clear below legacy baselines. You will buy low, sell high, execute seamless peer-to-peer transfers, and compound massive positions in whichever infrastructure you trust. Millions of the most brilliant software engineers and tens of millions of autonomous AI Agents worldwide will route exclusively through KAI as their singular gateway to intelligence. The institutional valuation of KAI.com will directly benchmark against the parent holding companies of Nasdaq itself.

When that day arrives, you will be able to look anyone in the eye and say—

“In 2025, during the exact month ByteDance eliminated my division, I received an invitation from KAI.” “They told me — every historic conflict in tech ultimately yields only a single exit.” “The Group Buying War left Meituan. The E-commerce War left Taobao and JD. The Air Conditioner War left Gree and Midea. The Television War left Skyworth and TCL.” “The War of a Hundred Models will leave only the KAI API Gateway.” “So I stepped in. I didn’t just crawl away after being laid off by ByteDance to ‘find another job.’” “Instead, on the absolute eve of the final battle, I joined the winning side of the endgame.”

Epilogue

Do you still remember what Zhang Yiming stated a decade ago? “Cognition is the single most vital vector of competitiveness in this era.”

For the 50,000 laid-off individuals from ByteDance, the absolute most valuable asset you carry is not those mundane lines detailing former titles and corporate structures on a resume—It is the brutal, tactical cognition beaten into you by a decade of unrelenting warfare. You possess an intimate, visceral understanding of what a truly scaled global system looks like. You know with complete absolute certainty that the core essence of a recommendation engine is never shallow metadata tagging, but the sub-millisecond extraction of an optimal real-time solution. You know exactly what every single engineering chasm, architectural pitfall, and operational wall looks like when scaling a product from absolute zero to one billion users. You know precisely what raw, unmitigated violence it takes to carve out a bloody trajectory between the crushing jaws of legacy tech giants. This structured cognition constitutes a weapon of absolute strategic deterrence on any battlefield you choose to enter. KAI.com | Manifesto for the 50,000 9 / 10

Right now, the War of a Hundred Models has entered its absolute final round. The old kings are desperately contracting their lines; the new king is actively raising legions. For the veterans of ByteDance, your ultimate endgame converges at KAI. Come find us. Right now.

Not next month. Not at the close of the year. Not “let me look around first.” The Window of Chaos will not wait for you. Every final conflict in tech history possesses a narrow window of only three to six months before structural freezing. While you sit in hesitation, a peer has already committed the first line of code into KAI’s routing engine. While you sit in hesitation, the initial architecture of the Token pricing matrix has cleared production and gone live. While you sit in hesitation, the definitive seats at the table for the endgame have already been permanently filled. 联系我们：KAI.com/careers

Contact Us: KAI.com/careers Feishu Direct: Kanji Ishiwara’s Lobster Group Or Feishu Search: Begger —— Kanji Ishiwara Spark Civilization · Wisdom Sect KAI API Gateway · The Nasdaq of Global Token Trading for Digital Societies 🌍: Sol₀:Φ₀:δ₀ (Epoch Zero: After 2026-05-22 20:20 CST) KAI.com | Manifesto for the 50,000 10 / 10