Wang Changhu, Head of Vision Technology and Former Director of AI Lab at ByteDance, Leaves Post

Tech Planet reported on Monday that Wang Changhu, the head of Vision Technology at ByteDance, has recently left his post at the firm.

Wang holds a doctorate from the University of Science and Technology of China. He graduated in 2009, and was a lead researcher at Microsoft Research, a research engineer at National University of Singapore. In 2017, he joined ByteDance AI Lab as a scientist and technology director.

His research interest is to explore computer vision, video comprehension, multimedia retrieval and machine learning. He was the director at ByteDance’s AI Lab for three years, then became head of Vision Technology at ByteDance this January.

The Vision Technology team mainly works on multimodal content understanding, content ecology, hot issue understanding and exploration of general and vertical businesses (such as commercialization, Douyin, Watermelon, Volcano, life services, games, teenagers and others). It tries to empower ByteDance products in terms of diverse content, content quality and value, content distribution and efficiency.

Over the past year or so, three leading technology experts including Wang left ByteDance AI Lab. Last July, Ma Weiying, former Vice President of ByteDance and Director of the AI Lab, resigned and joined the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Industry Research instead. In August, Li Lei, Director of the AI Lab, left his post and joined the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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An industry insider has suggested that a major factor for the academic leader’s departure is that ByteDance has overestimated the value of AI and underestimated the difficulty of its implementation. As a result, technology experts are paid higher than the value they produce.