Qiao Siyuan, a core member of ByteDance’s Seed large language model (LLM) team, has recently left the company to join Meta.

Qiao graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and earned his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2021.

He subsequently joined Google, working on AI research with Google Brain and Google DeepMind. In early 2025, after Google DeepMind’s VP of Research Wu Yonghui joined ByteDance to lead the Seed team, Qiao also joined the company.

Earlier this year, two other key members of the Seed visual model research team, Jiang Lu and Tian Zhi, departed ByteDance. Jiang joined Apple; he had joined ByteDance in February 2024 to lead AI video generation research and was formerly the project lead for Google VideoPoet.

Tian, who joined ByteDance in mid-2023 from AI startup BeyondLight, had been a technical lead and mentor for ByteDance’s TopSeed program for top AI talent.