Zhou Chang of ByteDance's Seed, who denied his resignation just four days ago, has again been reported to be launching a Physical AI startup.

Flash news from Dongcha Beating AI: Z Finance’s exclusive report states that Zhou Chang, a core leader of ByteDance’s Seed division, has left to launch a startup focused on Physical AI, and has secured backing from top-tier US dollar funds. On October 26, multiple media outlets including The Paper and Jiemian News received responses from sources close to ByteDance that Zhou Chang had not left the company. Zhou Chang previously served as technical lead of Alibaba’s Tongyi large model, joined ByteDance in 2024, initially in charge of multimodal interaction and world models. In 2025, after Yang Jianchao went on leave and Feng Jiashi departed, visual generation businesses such as Seedream and Seedance were gradually placed under his management. In June this year, the Seed Robotics team, previously led by Li Hang, also began reporting to Zhou Chang; ByteDance was at the time recruiting an embodied intelligence lead to report directly to him. However, Z Finance notes that Zhou Chang’s management scope began contracting 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, who joined ByteDance via campus recruitment in 2021. She persisted in efforts to train a video model with at least 200 billion parameters, and secured internal computing resources with support from Wu Yonghui and Zhou Chang. Physical AI aims to advance AI beyond understanding and generating digital content to perceiving, predicting, and acting on the physical world. The world models, multimodal, and robotics businesses Zhou Chang previously oversaw are all relevant to this. However, it has not yet been disclosed whether the new startup will focus on foundational models, simulation platforms, or robotics hardware.