ByteDance denies rumor that AI leader Zhou Chang has quit

Rumors recently spread that Zhou Chang, a key AI research leader at ByteDance's Seed team, had resigned. Word was that he might start a company in embodied AI, and top funds, big tech investors, and leading AI model startups had already reached out to him.

In response, people close to ByteDance said Zhou Chang has not left the company and is still working in his current role.

Zhou Chang earned his PhD from Peking University in 2017. He previously worked at Alibaba, where he led the tech team behind the Qwen large model and helped launch several language and multimodal models.

He joined ByteDance in August 2024 and now leads visual multimodal generation for the Doubao large model, one of its core technologies.