On June 25, it was reported that Kong Tao, the head of the ByteDance robot team, had left his post in early June and had begun to prepare his own entrepreneurial project. There are rumors that Kong Tao's new entrepreneurial project has received a lot of support and may receive investment from multiple institutions. It is reported that several members of the robotics team have resigned, and ByteDance is urgently recruiting a successor to Kong Tao.
The robot team was originally affiliated with ByteAI Lab and reported to the person in charge, Li Hang. In April of this year, ByteDance AI Lab was fully incorporated into the Seed team, shifting its reporting from reporting to Zhu Wenjia to reporting to the new Seed leader Wu Yonghui. Afterwards, Li Hang's retirement and re employment management scope remained unchanged, and his identity in the internal system was changed to "Labor/Consultant".
Kong Tao graduated from the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University in July 2019 with Professor Sun Fuchun as his tutor. His doctoral dissertation was nominated as the Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award of the Chinese Association of Artificial Intelligence, and won the championship of the 2016 International Robot Capture Operation Competition and other honors. The total citation of his thesis is currently up to 15k on Google Scholar. He joined the byte as a doctoral graduate and is the first employee to research robots. At that time, there was no robot research direction in the company. The article on the official account "ByteDance technology" wrote that after Kong Tao arrived at byte, he initiated the project of robot direction. There was no complex review process and repeated decision-making links, and it was passed quickly. At that time, the team members were only him and one intern.
