Google veteran Wu Yonghui joins ByteDance to lead AI research

Google veteran Wu Yonghui has been appointed by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to lead AI research. Wu spent around 17 years in Google with roles held in Google Brain while working on natural language processing tasks including speech translation and automatic speech recognition.

ByteDance launched the Seed Department in early 2023 for advanced research in large language models and GenAI. According to a new report by the South China Morning Post, Wu who is based in San Jose, California, and will be directly reporting to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.

Notably, Wu was promoted to VP of Research, Google Fellow in 2023, a senior-level role in Google DeepMind.

In January, ByteDance released Doubao-1.5-pro, an update to their flagship AI model, as well as another AI model in February called OmniHuman-1 which can generate highly realistic videos of humans from a single image and motion signal.

The Beijing-based tech giant has been pushing its might into AI as the race intensifies with the release of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s new open-source reasoning model, DeepSeek-R1 which is comparable to OpenAI’s o1 model across most benchmarks.