Key figure at seed AI leaves company, startup ventures in sight

Recent reports suggest that Zhou Chang, a core leader in Seed AI's research and development at ByteDance, is considering a departure. According to insiders, Zhou is planning to launch a startup focused on embodied intelligence, with significant interest from major venture capital firms, big tech investors, and leading large model unicorns. Zhou, who graduated from Fudan University with a bachelor's degree in computer science and technology in 2012, earned his doctorate in computer software and theory from Peking University in 2017. He previously worked at Alibaba, where he was known by the nickname 'Zhonghuang' and served as the technical leader for the Qwen large model, contributing to the development of several language and multimodal models. In August 2024, Zhou joined ByteDance, where he now leads the visual multimodal generation direction for the Doupan large model.