Reports suggest that Zhou Chang, the principal R&D lead for ByteDance’s Seed AI, has tendered his resignation, with plans to venture into the realm of embodied AI. He is said to be actively engaging in discussions with several prominent funds, strategic investors from major corporations, and leading large model unicorns. However, sources close to ByteDance have refuted this claim. Zhou Chang, who holds a bachelor's degree from Fudan University and a doctorate from Peking University, previously worked at Alibaba’s DAMO Academy, where he was the technical lead for Alibaba’s Tongyi large model. Before his departure, he oversaw the release of Qwen2, which soared to the top of the Hugging Face open-source rankings. In June 2024, he joined ByteDance, taking charge of multimodal interaction, world models, and other related businesses. He also assumed responsibility for the visual multimodal generation direction of the original Doubao large model, broadening his management scope to encompass visual generation businesses. His duties span multimodal large models, visual generation, world models, and extend to robotics. He is one of the key R&D personnel behind the video generation model Seedance 2.0.