

That was before TikTok crossed the billion-user threshold. Six years later, a $3 billion fundraising round led by SoftBank valued Bytedance at $75 billion, ranking it among the world’s most valuable startups. The privately held Bytedance was founded in 2012 by former Microsoft engineer Zhang Yiming. And thanks to TikTok’s runaway success, Bytedance has emerged as a somewhat unlikely player in another global contest: the A.I. That secret sauce is provided by TikTok’s parent company, Beijing Bytedance. While the content that powers TikTok is created by the app’s obsessive user base, the company’s A.I.-powered recommendation algorithms-which customize picks for users with increasingly uncanny insight-are what makes the platform so truly enthralling. In the world of TikTok, a group of tweens doing a choreographed dance routine can go viral overnight a dancing ferret can garner millions of likes or a clip of a man shaking his groove thing in a plushy rabbit costume might turn into a meme.

as of November-TikTok is racing ahead in the battle for eyeballs, where its short clips compete with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. With some 1.5 billion downloads worldwide-including 124 million in the U.S. But what Warhol failed to imagine back in the 1960s was TikTok, the dangerously addictive video-sharing app that today doles out global renown in 15-second increments. The pop artist famously asserted that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes.
