Dr. Yonghui is currently serving as the Head of Seed Fundamental Research for ByteDance’s large-scale model team, reporting directly to ByteDance CEO
Dr. Wu Yonghui, a well-known Google Fellow and former VP of Research at Google DeepMind, has joined ByteDance. He will be heading the Seed Fundamental Research team, focusing on AI for Science. Dr. Yonghui is a renowned “Google Fellow”, a prestigious role equivalent to a Vice President (VP), typically awarded to experts who have made exceptional contributions to technology.Â
ByteDance has confirmed that Dr. Yonghui, a a 17-year Google veteran, has left Google to join the company. According to reports by media outlets including The Information. Dr. Yonghui is currently serving as the Head of Seed Fundamental Research for ByteDance’s large-scale model team, reporting directly to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.
Established in late January 2023, the Seed Fundamental Research Team of ByteDance is now being led by Dr. Wu Yonghui. The research team is dedicated to exploring innovative paths to general intelligence. The program focuses on long-term, aggressive, and potentially uncertain AI research projects. It encourages cross-team and cross-modal collaboration, providing an open research environment and dedicated computing resources.
The team aims to push the boundaries of reasoning, perception, scaling, learning paradigms, and model design. They are exploring areas like large-scale reinforcement learning, world modeling, next-generation learning paradigms, and efficient model design tailored to next-generation hardware.
Dr. Wu Yonghui’s move to ByteDance is likely to intensify competition in the AI field. His expertise and leadership in AI research could significantly enhance ByteDance’s capabilities, making them a stronger competitor against other tech giants like Google, OpenAI, and DeepMind.
ByteDance has already been making strides with models like Goku and OmniHuman-1, which have reportedly surpassed some of OpenAI’s models in performance. With Wu on board, ByteDance might accelerate its AI advancements, potentially leading to more innovative and powerful AI solutions.
This could push other companies to invest more in AI research and development to keep up, ultimately benefiting the field with more cutting-edge technologies and applications.