According to Jiemian, the Seed team, a core AI department under ByteDance, is experiencing significant talent turnover. In the past year, nearly 70 technical talents have left and joined leading tech giants and AI startups. This shift reflects that the competition for talent in the domestic large model field has entered a highly intense phase.
As the core force of ByteDance's AI R&D, the Seed team, established in 2023, covers cutting-edge fields such as LLM, speech, vision, and world models. Its developed
However, over the past year, the team has become a major target for "talent poaching" in the industry. Nearly 30 members have joined Tencent, mainly responsible for AI Infra and data infrastructure; top intern Ge Hao has moved to Alibaba's Qwen team, deeply participating in the research and development of reinforcement learning infrastructure.
The outflow of talent not only goes to established tech giants but has also triggered a large-scale "ByteDance-style" entrepreneurship trend in the venture capital market. Currently, more than 30 AI companies founded by former ByteDance employees have received funding, with businesses covering Agent, multimodal creation, and embodied intelligence. Although ByteDance launched a high-value stock option allowance in September 2025—providing its large model technicians with stock options worth up to 135,000 yuan per month—in an attempt to retain key talents, it still failed to stop the active migration of talents in the face of industry trends.
