ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, is reorganizing its artificial intelligence division after hiring a specialist from Google to oversee foundational research, according to insiders at the Chinese technology company.
ByteDance's Seed department, established in early 2023 following the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, has recruited Wu Yonghui, a "Google Fellow" who spent 17 years at the American tech giant. Unlike the department's head Zhu Wenjia, Wu will report directly to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.
At the same time, some team leaders within Seed, who previously reported to Zhu, now report to Wu, including Li Hang, who is both the head of research and director of the AI Lab, and Xiang Liang, who led the development of the company's Doubao large language model, according to ByteDance employees with access to internal reporting systems.
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ByteDance, China's most valuable unicorn, is facing pressure from DeepSeek, a development that has sparked a nationwide frenzy over artificial intelligence. In the consumer app space, DeepSeek has surpassed Doubao as the most popular AI chatbot among Chinese consumers. According to QuestMobile, DeepSeek's daily active users exceeded Doubao's late last month.
Following DeepSeek's high-profile launch with its open-source strategy and cost-effective yet high-performance capabilities, its website and app have attracted a combined 100 million visitors in just one week. For comparison, it took ChatGPT two months and TikTok nine months to reach this level of popularity, according to AI app tracker AIcpb.com.
Huang Wenhao, co-founder of AI start-up 01.ai, who joined ByteDance last year, is now also under the supervision of Wu, according to the company's internal system. 01.ai was founded by former Google China chief Lee Kai-fu in 2013 as part of a burst of investment in generative AI technology.
Multiple Chinese media outlets reported, citing a source familiar with ByteDance, that Zhu remains at Seed, concentrating on implementing the technology, while Wu is primarily in charge of fundamental research.
Other departments at ByteDance are also undergoing restructuring, including the trust and safety team, which is in charge of platform policy and content moderation. From Thursday, the company started informing employees in Asia, the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa about impending job reductions, according to Reuters and the Straits Times.
The extent of the impact is unclear. Some staff had their company accounts suspended within just one hour of receiving the notification, according to a source close to the situation.
Neither ByteDance nor TikTok replied to a request for comment about the restructuring.
Last week, CEO Liang stated at an internal staff meeting that DeepSeek did not originate the "chain-of-thought" method used in reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1. In September 2024, OpenAI introduced the OpenAI o1 model, which engages in a lengthy internal chain of thought before responding to inquiries.
Liang stated that ByteDance noticed a shift in the technical direction following the release of o1, but it was not prompt enough in responding to this change, as reported by The Paper.
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