[Xiaomi Forms AI4Materials Team, Early ByteDance AI4S Employee Yu Zhi'ao Appointed as Head] According to monitoring by Beating, Yu Zhi'ao, an early employee of ByteDance's AI4S team and co-founder of Silicon Valley battery startup Feon Energy, has recently joined Xiaomi Group as the head of the Materials Core team. AI4Materials and Materials Core represent Xiaomi's latest strategic initiative in cutting-edge technology following its in-house development of large models, focusing on the synergy, integration, and advanced research of AI and materials, covering various new material directions required by Xiaomi Group. Yu Zhi'ao graduated from Peking University and holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Stanford University. During his doctoral studies, he interned at Tesla and also served as an AI+Materials advisor for DeepModeling Technology. Recently, the AI+Materials field has garnered significant attention across industries, with both the U.S. and Chinese markets experiencing a surge in investment. Internationally, Project Prometheus, co-led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as Co-CEO, has raised over $12 billion in funding. Domestically, DeepModeling has accumulated nearly 1 billion RMB in funding, while Kaiwu Ji completed over 1 billion RMB in financing at a rapid pace around the 2026 Chinese New Year. Additionally, major players such as Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Alibaba DAMO Academy, and ByteDance have all established related teams internally. [Original Link]