Google researcher Wu Yonghui, a 17-year veteran at the tech company, has jumped ship to join TikTok-parent company ByteDance to help lead the company’s efforts in the artificial intelligence (AI) race. Yonghui, a key figure in the development of Gemini AI models, has joined ByteDance in a senior leadership role, reporting directly to CEO Liang Rubo.
Citing the two people with the knowledge, The Information reports that this marks a significant acquisition of AI talent for ByteDance, placing Wu among the company’s top executives, including TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew.
‘AI Brain drain’ from Google
This is not the first time that Google’s AI executives have joined other companies to lead their efforts. For example, Mustafa Suleyman, who currently leads Microsoft’s AI unit. The British AI entrepreneur is the co-founder and former head of applied AI at DeepMind, an AI company acquired by Google.
Similarly, Google also lost Noam Shazeer, a co-author of a seminal 2017 research paper that catalyzed the current AI boom. He left to co-found Character.AI, which Google later acquired for $2.7 billion, essentially to bring Shazeer back.
Last year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked whether he was worried that Google researchers left the company to start rivals or to join others like OpenAI. Pichai said that he did not have a problem with that because it was healthy.
“Googlers have left to create over 2,000 startups, last I counted, and I think that’s great. Some of them are cloud customers down the line for us. Some of them come back. I think it’s healthy,” he said.