A renowned artificial intelligence researcher who spearheaded foundational AI research for TikTok owner ByteDance has announced his departure from the company.

The unexpected development comes as the firm is increasingly looking to monetise its core AI offerings, including subscription plans for its flagship consumer AI app Doubao.

Gu Quanquan, also an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), announced his departure from ByteDance on social media on Tuesday, four months after he helped oversee the tech giant’s release of its latest flagship AI model, Seed 2.0.

In the post, Gu thanked his ByteDance colleagues and leadership “for an incredibly rewarding journey”, without revealing his next destination.

Gu joined the company in 2023 initially to oversee its AI-for-science research, with a focus on cutting-edge efforts to using AI to accelerate drug discovery.

In March last year, soon after DeepSeek’s breakthrough moment acted as a catalyst for China’s domestic AI industry, he pivoted to directing ByteDance’s push to catch up in the frontier large language model (LLM) race as co-lead for model pre-training and scaling.

ByteDance has since emerged as one of China’s leading AI players, as Doubao has grown to be the country’s most popular consumer AI app with around 336 million monthly active users. The AI assistant app integrates the capabilities of both Seed 2.0 and Seedance 2.0, ByteDance’s controversial video-generation model.