Zhou Chang, a key technical lead at ByteDance's Seed division, has departed the company to launch a new venture focused on Physical AI. The startup has already secured backing from a major USD-denominated fund, though specific financial details, including valuation and investment amounts, remain undisclosed.
During his tenure at ByteDance, Zhou reported to Seed head Wu Yonghui. His responsibilities spanned multimodal interaction, world models, visual generation, and robotics. Before joining ByteDance in August 2024, he served as the head of visual multimodal generation for the Doubao large language model.
Zhou's professional background includes a significant period at Alibaba, where he was known by the alias Zhong Huang. In that role, he led the technical development of the Tongyi Qianwen large model, overseeing the creation of various language and multimodal models alongside his team.
His academic credentials include a bachelor's degree in computer science from Fudan University, earned in 2012, and a doctorate in computer software and theory from Peking University, completed in 2017. Reports regarding his departure surfaced following earlier industry rumors.
