I first met Zhang Yiming, the founder of Bytedance, six years ago at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. 

The Information and GeekPark, a Chinese tech incubator, were hosting an event for entrepreneurs from the U.S. and China. Zhang, who was then little-known, had founded a Chinese news app called Toutiao which uses AI to recommend news articles. He explained that approach in a presentation called “Look at The Future of Information from Reading Habits in China.”