Four days after denying resignation, ByteDance Seed's Zhou Chang is again reported to be starting a business in Physical AI.

Beating AI News Flash, Z Finance exclusively reports that ByteDance Seed core lead Zhou Chang has left to start a business in Physical AI, backed by top-tier USD funds.

Just on October 26, multiple media outlets including The Paper and Jiemian News received responses from sources close to ByteDance saying "Zhou Chang has not left."

Zhou Chang was formerly the technical lead of Alibaba's Tongyi large model, joined ByteDance in 2024, initially responsible for multimodal interaction and world models. In 2025, as Yang Jianzhao took leave and Feng Jiashi departed, visual generation businesses including Seedream and Seedance were gradually transferred to his management. In June of this year, the Seed Robotics team originally led by Li Hang also began reporting to Zhou Chang, and ByteDance was at the time still recruiting an embodied intelligence lead to report directly to him.

However, Z Finance reports that Zhou Chang's management scope began to shrink in the second half of this year, with more work transferred to Zeng Yan. Zeng Yan is the core R&D lead of Seedance 2.0 and joined ByteDance through campus recruitment in 2021. She had insisted on attempting to train a video model with at least 200 billion parameters and secured computing resources internally, ultimately gaining support from Wu Yonghui and Zhou Chang.

The goal of Physical AI is to enable AI to move beyond understanding and generating digital content toward perceiving, predicting, and acting upon the physical world. The world models, multimodal, and robotics businesses Zhou Chang previously oversaw are all related to this. But whether the new company will focus on foundation models, simulation platforms, or robotics hardware has not yet been disclosed.