Veteran Google AI researcher joins Chinese TikTok owner ByteDance in leadership role

Wu Yonghui, who worked at Google for 17 years, will lead foundational research at the Seed division and report directly to CEO Liang Rubo, sources say

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ByteDance has tapped Wu Yonghui, a leading AI scientist from Google, to lead foundational research at its Seed division. Photo: AFP

Published: 5:00pm, 18 Feb 2025Updated: 5:37pm, 18 Feb 2025

Wu Yonghui, a prestigious “Google Fellow” who worked at the US tech giant for 17 years, recently joined TikTok owner ByteDance to lead foundational research on artificial intelligence (AI), as the firm seeks to “explore the upper limit of intelligence”.

Wu now works at ByteDance’s Seed department, which the Beijing-based company started in early 2023 after OpenAI’s ChatGPT sparked widespread interest in large language models and generative AI. Wu, based in San Jose, California, directly reports to company CEO Liang Rubo, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Wu has been named head of Seed’s foundational research, one of the people said.

ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Wu joined Google in 2008 as a software engineer. Between 2014 and 2023, he was with Google Brain, the company’s research team working in various fields including machine learning, genomics and natural language understanding.

In September 2023, he was promoted to Google Fellow, a senior-level position on the company’s engineering track, equivalent to a vice-president for managers. Wu’s last job at Google was as vice-president of research at the tech giant’s AI research lab DeepMind, according to his LinkedIn profile.