Wu Yonghui (吴永辉)

Head of Seed Basic Research (since Feb 2025); reports to CEO Liang RuboByteDance

Spent 17 years at Google (2008–2025), rising from software engineer to Google Fellow (September 2023, equivalent to VP on the engineering track) and Research VP at Google DeepMind. First author of the landmark GNMT paper (2016, "Google's Neural Machine Translation System," 7,000+ citations) that transformed machine translation. Participated in early Gemini development.

Joined ByteDance in February 2025 as Head of Seed Basic Research, managing ~1,500 personnel across foundational models, multimodal systems, and infrastructure. Based in San Jose. Highest technical decision-maker for the Seedance video generation model series. ~35,000 citations.

Affiliations

  • ByteDance — Head of Seed Basic Research (since Feb 2025); reports to CEO Liang Rubo
    Formerly: Google (17 years, 2008-2025); Google Fellow (2023); Research VP, Google DeepMind; PhD UC Riverside (2008); MS Statistics UC Riverside; BS Nanjing University

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