ByteDance Adjusts AI Department “Seed”, Yonghui Wu Becomes New Head
ByteDance is making strategic adjustments to its AI core department, Seed, according to insiders cited by Chinese online media outlet, GenAI.
Dr. Yonghui Wu, a recent Google recruit who contributed to the Gemini development, is set to take the helm at Seed. He will replace Zhu Wenjia, the previous head of both the LLM team and Seed, causing a reshuffling of reporting structures within the team.
When asked for confirmation, ByteDance stated that Dr. Yonghui Wu will primarily focus on AI basic research exploration, while Zhu Wenjia will concentrate on model application-related work. Both will continue to be part of the Seed department and report to Liang Rubo.
The timing of this personnel change is meaningful, coming just a week after ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo acknowledged the company’s shortcomings in AI and the need for faster progress in major technological advancements during an internal meeting.
Throughout 2024, ByteDance devoted substantial resources to the application layer, successfully transforming DouBao into the AI application with the highest number of daily active users in China by year’s end. However, with the advent of 2025 and the impact of DeepSeek R1, ByteDance has realized that maintaining its AI leadership requires more than just product innovation and traffic advantages.
An insider shared, “ByteDance appeared to push DouBao aggressively last year, but DouBao is just a codename. The significant investment in the large-scale model behind it resulted in the voice model being the most successful. However, the video model fell short of world-class standards, and the LLM’s development was merely average, particularly as it failed to keep pace with the DeepSeek wave. This is likely a key reason for Dr. Yonghui Wu’s recruitment.”
These changes suggest a reorganization of ByteDance’s AI business structure, with Seed, under Dr. Yonghui Wu’s leadership, set to concentrate on fundamental model R&D, separate from application development.
In recent years, talent mobility has been evident between startups and large companies, as well as across national boundaries, with companies like Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI all part of this dynamic. This trend underscores the increasing attractiveness of opportunities in domestic tech giants for foreign scientists, as well as the high cost for domestic firms to recruit talent from abroad. Thus, Dr. Yonghui Wu’s move from Google to ByteDance is seen as a significant turning point.
At a recent all-hands meeting, ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo reflected on missed opportunities in the AI space and outlined key goals for 2025. One of these goals is to push the boundaries of “intelligence” rather than focus on specific product metrics, such as DouBao’s daily active users. This pivot towards intelligence as a goal is expected to stimulate more innovation and prevent overlooking key technological milestones.
ByteDance has also launched a research project called “Seed Edge” aimed at advancing long-term, foundational AGI research beyond the scope of pre-training and large model iteration. The firm has relaxed performance metrics and extended assessment cycles to encourage the exploration of long-term, uncertain, and ambitious projects.
This shift in focus towards breaking the boundaries of intelligence indicates ByteDance’s intent to compete with the world’s leading large model companies, a departure from its previous “application factory” approach. Dr. Yonghui Wu, with his strong technical background and experience, is well-positioned to lead ByteDance’s AI division into the future of basic model exploration.
