ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo warned employees at a company-wide meeting on Tuesday that the TikTok owner risks becoming complacent and slipping into mediocrity as it faces challenges from newer startups. Liang said the Beijing-based company's rapid expansion in recent years had made it less efficient, and it had not paid enough attention to groundbreaking artificial intelligence technology, according to a ByteDance post about the meeting on social media. ""Our company is not sensitive enough to new technologies,"" Liang said. ByteDance is often seen as the world's leading company on algorithms because its flagship apps, such as TikTok, Douyin, and Toutiao, are powered by commanding recommendation engines. Liang added that ByteDance was suffering from too much internal red tape as the company expanded, with it now taking six months to work on projects that a startup could complete in one month.