Is Zhou Chang, the head of core R&D at Seedance, leaving his position to start a business? A person close to ByteDance responded.

Recently, market rumors have emerged that Zhou Chang, the core R&D head of the Seedance project under ByteDance's Seed team, has submitted his resignation and plans to start a business in the embodied intelligence track. Multiple investment institutions and strategic investment arms of major tech companies have actively reached out to contact him.

On October 26, a person close to ByteDance responded to a reporter from Jiemian News, saying, "Zhou Chang has not left the company."

This is not the first time that Zhou Chang has been rumored to leave ByteDance. Back in December 2025, claims that he would resign to start a business spread on social platforms. At that time, Zhou Chang directly clarified the rumor on his WeChat Moments, stating that the misinformation had interfered with his normal R&D work.

When he first joined ByteDance, he was mainly responsible for multimodal interaction and world model related work, reporting to Wu Yonghui, head of the Seed team. In July 2025, Yang Jianchao, the former head of visual multimodal generation for Doubao, announced a temporary break, and all visual generation businesses including Seedream and Seedance were transferred to Zhou Chang for management. Since then, he has taken charge of ByteDance's two most important generative model lines: text-to-image and text-to-video, with the business scope later extending to the pre-research directions of robotics and embodied intelligence.

Seedance has become a representative product of ByteDance. In June 2025, Seedance 1.0 was officially launched. On the video leaderboard of the third-party evaluation platform Artificial Analysis, it won first place in both text-to-video and image-to-video categories, outperforming mainstream models of the same period such as Google Veo 3 and Kling 2.0. According to ByteDance's introduction, Seedance 1.0 can generate 5-second 1080P videos, with a generation time of about 40 seconds under specified hardware environments.

In February 2026, Seedance 2.0 was released, realizing native joint generation of audio and video, with significant improvements in lens scheduling, subtle character facial expressions, and narrative coherence of long scripts. Feng Ji, the producer of *Black Myth: Wukong*, publicly commented on Seedance 2.0 at that time, calling it "the strongest video generation model on Earth".

Before joining ByteDance, Zhou Chang was already a key core technical leader in China's large model track. His public resume shows that he graduated from Fudan University with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Technology in 2012, and obtained his doctorate in Computer Software and Theory from Peking University in 2017, with his doctoral research focusing on deep learning, graph mining and distributed computing.

After graduating with a doctorate, Zhou Chang joined Alibaba DAMO Academy, with the Hua name Zhong Huang. In the early stage, he participated in the R&D of e-commerce recommendation algorithms, then shifted to multimodal large models, led the R&D of the M6 multimodal pre-trained model, and later served as the technical lead of Tongyi Qianwen.

In July 2024, there were reports that Zhou Chang planned to resign to start a business. At that time, insiders revealed to Jiemian News that Zhou Chang was one of the core technical backbones of the algorithm team of Tongyi Lab, and his resignation was a normal personnel movement. On the eve of Zhou Chang's departure, Alibaba's newly launched Qwen2 topped the Hugging Face open source leaderboard just two hours after its release, outperforming the then benchmark Llama3-70B in performance and becoming a milestone domestic open source large model product.

Personnel changes of top talents at ByteDance have long drawn widespread public attention. Confirmed by multiple sources, nearly 70 technical talents from ByteDance's Seed team have resigned in the past year, and joined leading domestic internet companies, large model enterprises and global tech giants. In the venture capital market, former ByteDance employees are highly favored by investment institutions.

In March this year, according to a report by 36Kr, Tencent has intensively recruited multiple core technical backbones from ByteDance's former Seed team, and all relevant personnel report directly to Yao Shunyu, Tencent's Chief AI Scientist. The newly joined core members include Xiao Xuefeng, former head of ByteDance's Seed visual AI platform, Zhang Chi from the Infra team, Huang Qi, former head of the training Infra group, Yuan Yufeng, former head of the RL algorithm group, and others. Among them, Xiao Xuefeng serves as the assistant head of Tencent's newly established AI Infra department, assisting Yao Shunyu in managing the department, while the rest of the personnel also hold core positions in Tencent's large model related departments.

Alibaba's Qwen team has also poached multiple AI talents from ByteDance. Ye Zilingfeng, a former member of ByteDance's Seed model training team, joined Alibaba after leaving ByteDance. Ge Hao, a top Seed intern at ByteDance, joined Alibaba's Qwen team after his internship at ByteDance, and got promoted rapidly, becoming a core member of RL Infra training for the Qwen model and reporting directly to Zhou Jingren.

However, news of AI talents joining ByteDance also keeps emerging from time to time. In March this year, insiders revealed that Yu Bowen, former head of post-training for the Qwen large model at Alibaba's Tongyi Lab, had joined ByteDance as the head of post-training for the visual model and multimodal interaction team under the Seed team. ByteDance has not responded to this matter.

In April, according to a report by LatePost, Guo Daya, a former researcher at DeepSeek, has joined ByteDance's Seed organization responsible for large model R&D, as one of the leads of the agent team, with a job rank of L8.

The report stated that after Guo Daya joined Seed, his total compensation package consists of cash, ByteDance options and Doubao shares as large model incentives. At the beginning of this year, the price of Doubao shares rose by about 30%, but the valuation is still significantly low. It is understood that conservative estimates show that assuming the price of Doubao shares continues to rise, after all Doubao shares vest in four years, the total income Guo Daya gets from joining ByteDance may reach hundreds of millions of yuan, with an average annual income of nearly 100 million yuan.

But soon, Li Liang, Vice President of Douyin Group, posted on social platforms, saying, "This report is untrue. All technical personnel of the Seed team recruited by ByteDance follow the same compensation system, including cash, ByteDance options and Doubao options. The options vest in full over a four-year period, there is no such situation as 'you need to meet certain conditions to get all the shares', and we have not recruited any employees with an annual salary of nearly 100 million yuan recently. Of course, the future income from ByteDance and Doubao options for Seed employees will fluctuate according to the option price. If the business develops very well, it is not ruled out that some Seed technical personnel will have an income of hundreds of millions of yuan four years later."

Core leaders of cutting-edge labs at major tech companies being repeatedly rumored to resign or join new employers has become the norm in China's AGI industry. On the one hand, financing enthusiasm for tracks such as embodied intelligence and video generation remains high, and entrepreneurial opportunities and capital invitations keep pouring into top technical leaders; on the other hand, changes in internal assessment, computing power allocation and business positioning within leading model labs will also continuously drive talent flow.

This article is from "Jiemian News", reported by reporter Song Jianan, and republished by 36Kr with authorization.