According to Beating Monitor, ByteDance’s multimodal lead, Zhou Chang, has recently expanded his scope of management: the Seed Robotics team, previously under Li Hang, has been reporting to Zhou Chang for over a month. Meanwhile, ByteDance is recruiting a lead in embodied intelligence to oversee the overall planning of its robotics business, offering an L8 level—equivalent to Alibaba’s P10 to P11—to technical leaders from top-tier embodied intelligence startups. The integration of ByteDance’s Robotics team signals a move toward centralized management of robotics R&D resources. Combining multimodal interaction, world models, and embodied intelligence enables deeper reuse of technical requirements and data resources. Previously, hardware, data, and model development for robotics were handled by separate teams, resulting in overlapping efforts in algorithm research. Now, robotics will serve as the physical embodiment of large models, providing real-world interaction data from environments such as warehouses, factories, and homes to multimodal models. As the core lead of Seed, Zhou Chang’s responsibilities have expanded multiple times since joining ByteDance from Alibaba’s Damo Academy in 2024. Beyond multimodal interaction and world models, Zhou has taken over visual generation businesses—including the text-to-image model Seedream and the text-to-video model Seedance—following the departure of visual foundation model lead Feng Jianshi and the leave of absence of visual multimodal generation lead Yang Jianchao. The Robotics team now under Zhou’s management was formerly ByteDance’s AI Lab robotics team, which was integrated into the Seed system in 2025. The former lead, Li Hang, now reports to Jin Xiaowei, head of academic partnerships, serving in an advisory capacity on academic collaborations. In addition to ByteDance’s efforts to build a closed-loop technology ecosystem, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on June 1 that OpenAI’s robotics team is hiring full-stack engineers in hardware, operations, systems, and machine learning, with plans to build socially useful robots through programming and manufacturing—progressing from short-term infrastructure development toward the long-term vision of personal assistants.
ByteDance restructures the Seed Robotics team and appoints Zhou Chang as Head of Embodied Intelligence.
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Summary
ByteDance has restructured its Seed Robotics team, with Zhou Chang now leading embodied intelligence. Previously under Li Hang, the team has been under Zhou’s management for over a month. The company is also recruiting a senior L8-level leader for its robotics division from top startups. This move consolidates R&D resources and integrates multimodal interaction with world models, positioning robots as deployment platforms for large models in real-world environments. Zhou joined from Alibaba’s DAMO Academy in 2024 and has since taken charge of multiple projects. Li Hang now serves as a consultant under Jin Xiaowei. Amid major altcoin news, leading players such as OpenAI are also expanding their robotics teams, signaling a broader industry trend.
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