ByteDance Seed Team: Multimodal Lead Zhou Chang Takes Over Embodied AI, L8 Executive Recruitment Targets Startup Company

According to Dongzuo Beating monitoring, ByteDance's multimodal lead Zhou Chang's management scope has recently expanded again, with the Seed Robotics robot team formerly led by Li Hang reporting to Zhou Chang for over a month. At the same time, ByteDance is recruiting a multimodal AI technology lead responsible for the overall planning of the robot business, targeting top-tier AI startups at a tech lead level ranging from Alibaba's P10 to P11, denoted as L8.

ByteDance's consolidation of the Robotics team marks a shift towards centralized management of the robot direction's R&D resources. The integration of multimodal interaction, world models, and embodied AI business is conducive to deep reuse of technical requirements and data resources in the robot direction. In the previous architecture, robot hardware, data, and model development were split among different teams, leading to overlaps in algorithm research directions. Following the adjustment, robots will serve as carriers for large-scale models to interact with real-world scenarios such as warehouses, factories, and homes, providing real interaction data for multimodal models.

As the core Seed R&D lead, Zhou Chang's responsibilities have expanded multiple times since joining ByteDance from Alibaba DAMO Academy in 2024. In addition to multimodal interaction and world models, Zhou Chang has successively taken over visual generation businesses such as the Senliv Image model Seedream, and the Senliv Video model Seedance, after the departure of the visual basic model lead Feng Jiashi and the vacation of the visual multimodal generation lead Yang Jianzhao. The Robotics team under Zhou Chang's management, formerly known as the ByteAI Lab Robotics team, was merged into the Seed system in 2025. Former lead Li Hang now reports to academic cooperation lead Jin Xiaowei, assuming an advisory role for academic cooperation.

In addition to ByteDance's consolidation of resources to build a tech ecosystem, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also announced on June 1st that the OpenAI Robotics team is recruiting full-stack hardware, operations, systems, and machine learning engineers. The team plans to build socially beneficial robots through programming and manufacturing, gradually moving from short-term infrastructure development towards a long-term vision of personal assistants.