DeepSeek Core Researcher Guo Daya Joins ByteDance, Sources Report

ME News reports that on April 15 (UTC+8), according to monitoring by Beating, Liu Jiang, co-founder of Turing Education, revealed on X that Guo Daya, a core researcher at DeepSeek, “has joined ByteDance.” Born in 1995, Guo holds a Ph.D. from Sun Yat-sen University and was jointly supervised by Professor Yin Jian and Dr. Ming Zhou from Microsoft Research Asia; he received the Microsoft Scholarship in 2020. After joining DeepSeek in July 2023, he was the first author of the DeepSeek-R1 paper. R1 is DeepSeek’s most influential model, the first to demonstrate that pure reinforcement learning can unlock large model reasoning capabilities—the paper later appeared on the cover of Nature. Guo’s departure from DeepSeek in March had previously been confirmed by multiple media outlets, but his next destination remained unconfirmed. Baidu was rumored to be his destination, but Baidu explicitly denied this, only confirming that other DeepSeek members had joined. If Liu’s claim is accurate, Guo will be the next top AI researcher to join ByteDance’s Seed team, following Yu Wenbo, former head of training for Qwen. (Source: BlockBeats)