On June 16th, according to informed sources, Li Hang, the head of ByteDance AI Lab, has officially stepped down and his identity in the internal system has changed to labor/consultant.
Founded in 2016, Byte AI Lab was the main AI exploration department of Byte before Seed was founded. Ma Weiying, the former executive vice president of Microsoft Research Asia, was initially responsible for it and reported directly to Zhang Yiming.
In mid-2020, Ma Weiying left ByteDance and the position of AI Lab leader was taken over by Li Hang until now. After the team restructuring, starting from 2023, the NLP group responsible for large language models under AI Lab and PixleDance responsible for developing video generation models were successively transferred to Seed. Starting from 2024, report to Zhu Wenjia, the then head of Seed.
On February 21, 2025, former Google DeepMind Vice President Wu Yonghui joined ByteDance as the head of basic research for the large model Seed. As the director of ByteDance AI Lab (Li Hang became the first person in charge after ByteDance Vice President Ma Weiying resigned), Li Hang turned to report to Wu Yonghui.
Recently, there have been changes in the heads of several big models, including Zhu Wenjia-1, who previously served as the head of ByteSeed. Firstly, the head of the big language model, Qiao Mu, has had his Feishu account suspended due to an extramarital affair; Later, it was announced that Yang Jianchao, the person in charge of visual multimodal generation, had resigned (this news has not been confirmed yet, and Yang Jianchao is still a formal employee of ByteDance); Now Li Hang has also stepped down as the director of AI Lab, and the ByteSeed team has entered a period of adjustment.
