Report: ByteDance Seed Core Lead Zhou Chang Leaves to Start Physical AI Venture
According to a Z Finance report, ByteDance Seed core lead Zhou Chang has left the company to start a venture in Physical AI, backed by leading USD funds; the specific investors, amount, and valuation were not disclosed. Zhou Chang previously reported to Seed head Wu Yonghui, with responsibilities covering multimodal interaction, world models, visual generation, and robotics, among other areas; the report says the related work may be taken over by an employee from the TikTok team. On October 26, a person close to ByteDance responded that Zhou Chang had not left; as of publication, ByteDance has not responded further.
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The report outlines changes in Zhou Chang's management scope at ByteDance and the background of his successor, offering a window into personnel adjustments in ByteDance Seed's multimodal and robotics directions.
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Report: ByteDance Seed core lead Zhou Chang leaves to start a business in Physical AI Phoenix Tech Download the app for exclusive early access October 31, 2026 09:58:04 From Beijing Updated October 31, 2026 10:03:53
Phoenix Tech News, October 31 — According to a Z Finance report, ByteDance Seed core lead Zhou Chang has left the company to start a business in Physical AI, backed by a leading US dollar fund. The specific investors, funding amount and valuation have not yet been disclosed.
Public information shows that Zhou Chang was previously one of the technical leads with a relatively broad scope of management within Seed, reporting to Seed head Wu Yonghui, and his business once covered areas including multimodal interaction, world models, visual generation and robotics. Z Finance reported that after his departure, the related work may be taken over by an employee from the TikTok team.
It is understood that in the second half of this year, Zhou Chang's management scope within ByteDance shrank somewhat, with more work undertaken by Zeng Yan. Zeng Yan was born in 1997 and joined ByteDance in 2021 as a campus recruit. She has long worked on video understanding and generation research and is one of the employees who rose fastest to level 4-2 within ByteDance. In the development of Seedance 2.0, Zeng Yan took on key work. According to a 36Kr report, she pushed for training larger-scale models and sought computing power resources for this purpose, and the related plan ultimately won the support of Wu Yonghui and Zhou Chang. According to Z Finance, Zeng Yan has recently also been expanding recruitment of R&D staff in the language model direction, and her scope is expected to expand further.
Previously, on October 26, a person close to ByteDance responded that "Zhou Chang has not left." As of press time, ByteDance has not responded further to the matter.
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