ByteDance's AI research division, Seed, is reportedly considering a major reorganization of its AI for Science (AI4S) team — including a possible spin-off from the company. According to sources, one proposal would move the AI4S team from under Xiang Liang's machine learning systems group (AML) to Yang Zhenyuan's purview. But the plan is still under discussion, and a person close to ByteDance says Yang is not enthusiastic about the transfer.
Since Wu Yonghui took over Seed, three teams from the AI Lab — embodied AI (Seed Robotics), AI for Science (AI4S), and Responsible AI — have been folded into Seed. The AI4S team's reporting line has changed multiple times. The team led by Xiao Wenzhi, originally under AML, was moved last year to Li Hang's AI for Science group, shifting Xiao's reporting from Xiang Liang to Li Hang. After Li Hang retired, the team returned to Xiang Liang's organization.
What's more striking than the organizational churn is the loss of core technical talent. Gu Quanquan, a UCLA computer science associate professor and co-head of Seed's large model pre-training and scaling efforts, and Xiao Wenzhi, the computational biology lead behind the Protenix project, have left to start a company. Their startup focuses on AI-driven drug discovery, protein design, and drug discovery platforms, and has already secured multiple funding rounds from top dollar-denominated venture firms.
The team's flagship achievements include Protenix, an open-source reproduction of AlphaFold 3, and PXDesign, a protein binder design tool that outperforms AlphaProteo. On five out of six protein targets, PXDesign achieved nanomolar binding hit rates ranging from 20% to 73%. But the economics of AI drug discovery are fundamentally different from internet businesses. Model predictions must be validated through wet-lab experiments, animal studies, investigational new drug applications, and business development — a painfully long feedback and monetization loop. That reality is driving many scientist teams to generate their own assets and spin out.