[ByteDance Restructures Seed Robotics Team: Multimodal Lead Zhou Chang Takes Over Embodied Intelligence, L8 Executive Recruitment Targets Startups] According to monitoring by Beating, ByteDance's multimodal lead Zhou Chang has recently expanded her management scope once again. The Seed Robotics team, previously led by Li Hang, has been reporting to Zhou Chang for over a month. Meanwhile, ByteDance is recruiting an embodied intelligence technical lead responsible for overall planning of robotics business, targeting top-tier embodied intelligence startup executives at the L8 level, equivalent to Alibaba's P10 to P11. The integration of the Robotics team within ByteDance signifies a move toward centralized management of research resources in the robotics domain. The combination of multimodal interaction, world models, and embodied intelligence facilitates deeper reuse of technical requirements and data resources for robotics. In the previous structure, hardware, data, and model development for robotics were split across different teams, leading to overlaps in algorithm development. After the adjustment, robotics will serve as a carrier for deploying large models into the physical world, providing real-world interaction data in scenarios such as warehouses, factories, and homes for multimodal models. As the core lead of Seed's R&D, Zhou Chang has seen her responsibilities expand multiple times since joining ByteDance from Alibaba DAMO Academy in 2024. Beyond multimodal interaction and world models, Zhou Chang has successively taken over visual generation businesses such as the text-to-image model Seedream and the text-to-video model Seedance, following the departure of visual foundational model lead Feng Jia and the leave of visual multimodal generation lead Yang Jianchao. The Robotics team, now under Zhou Chang's management, was formerly Byte AI Lab's robotics team and was integrated into the Seed system in 2025. Former lead Li Hang now reports to academic collaboration lead Jin Xiaowei and serves as an advisor for academic partnerships. In addition to ByteDance's efforts to consolidate resources and build a closed-loop technology ecosystem, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on June 1 that OpenAI's robotics team is recruiting full-stack hardware, operations, systems, and machine learning engineers. The team plans to develop socially beneficial robots through programming and manufacturing, gradually transitioning from short-term infrastructure building to a long-term vision of personal assistants. [Original Link]