Quanquan Gu, UCLA AGI Lab lead, departs ByteDance Seed after three years co-leading LLM and drug discovery efforts

Today marks my last day at ByteDance Seed.

Over the past 3 years, I had the opportunity to work across two of the most exciting frontiers in AI: AI for Drug Discovery and building frontier LLMs. Few opportunities in a career allow one to work simultaneously on curing disease and building frontier intelligence. I was fortunate to do both.

Since joining ByteDance, I have led the AI for drug discovery effort. Together with an exceptional team and collaborators, we built SeedFold, the world's first biomolecule structure prediction model to outperform AlphaFold 3 across a broad range of benchmarks and capabilities; SeedProteo, a state-of-the-art protein binder design model surpassing AlphaProteo, RFdiffusion, Chai-2, BinderCraft, and BoltzGen ; and the DPLM series of protein language models, along with several other ambitious AI for Science projects.

In early 2025, I took on a new challenge. To tackle one of the hardest problems in modern AI, reliably training and scaling frontier-scale LLMs, I joined the LLM pretraining effort and founded the LLM optimization and scaling team. Together, we built a highly scalable pretraining stack that enabled the successful training of Seed 2.0 and the subsequent frontier-scale models, significantly advancing our ability to train and iterate on frontier AI systems at scale.

I'm deeply grateful to my teammates, collaborators, and leadership for an incredibly rewarding journey.

The best model is yet to come.

Scaling continues!

Today marks my last day at ByteDance Seed.

Over the past 3 years, I had the opportunity to work across two of the most exciting frontiers in AI: AI for Drug Discovery and building frontier LLMs. Few opportunities in a career allow one to work simultaneously on curing disease and building frontier intelligence. I was fortunate to do both.

Since joining ByteDance, I have led the AI for drug discovery effort. Together with an exceptional team and collaborators, we built SeedFold, the world's first biomolecule structure prediction model to outperform AlphaFold 3 across a broad range of benchmarks and capabilities; SeedProteo, a state-of-the-art protein binder design model surpassing AlphaProteo, RFdiffusion, Chai-2, BinderCraft, and BoltzGen ; and the DPLM series of protein language models, along with several other ambitious AI for Science projects.

In early 2025, I took on a new challenge. To tackle one of the hardest problems in modern AI, reliably training and scaling frontier-scale LLMs, I joined the LLM pretraining effort and founded the LLM optimization and scaling team. Together, we built a highly scalable pretraining stack that enabled the successful training of Seed 2.0 and the subsequent frontier-scale models, significantly advancing our ability to train and iterate on frontier AI systems at scale.

I'm deeply grateful to my teammates, collaborators, and leadership for an incredibly rewarding journey.

The best model is yet to come.

Scaling continues!

Today marks my last day at ByteDance Seed.

Over the past 3 years, I had the opportunity to work across two of the most exciting frontiers in AI: AI for Drug Discovery and building frontier LLMs. Few opportunities in a career allow one to work simultaneously on curing disease and building frontier intelligence. I was fortunate to do both.

Since joining ByteDance, I have led the AI for drug discovery effort. Together with an exceptional team and collaborators, we built SeedFold, the world's first biomolecule structure prediction model to outperform AlphaFold 3 across a broad range of benchmarks and capabilities; SeedProteo, a state-of-the-art protein binder design model surpassing AlphaProteo, RFdiffusion, Chai-2, BinderCraft, and BoltzGen ; and the DPLM series of protein language models, along with several other ambitious AI for Science projects.

In early 2025, I took on a new challenge. To tackle one of the hardest problems in modern AI, reliably training and scaling frontier-scale LLMs, I joined the LLM pretraining effort and founded the LLM optimization and scaling team. Together, we built a highly scalable pretraining stack that enabled the successful training of Seed 2.0 and the subsequent frontier-scale models, significantly advancing our ability to train and iterate on frontier AI systems at scale.

I'm deeply grateful to my teammates, collaborators, and leadership for an incredibly rewarding journey.

The best model is yet to come.

Scaling continues!

Today marks my last day at ByteDance Seed.

Over the past 3 years, I had the opportunity to work across two of the most exciting frontiers in AI: AI for Drug Discovery and building frontier LLMs. Few opportunities in a career allow one to work simultaneously on curing disease and building frontier intelligence. I was fortunate to do both.

Since joining ByteDance, I have led the AI for drug discovery effort. Together with an exceptional team and collaborators, we built SeedFold, the world's first biomolecule structure prediction model to outperform AlphaFold 3 across a broad range of benchmarks and capabilities; SeedProteo, a state-of-the-art protein binder design model surpassing AlphaProteo, RFdiffusion, Chai-2, BinderCraft, and BoltzGen ; and the DPLM series of protein language models, along with several other ambitious AI for Science projects.

In early 2025, I took on a new challenge. To tackle one of the hardest problems in modern AI, reliably training and scaling frontier-scale LLMs, I joined the LLM pretraining effort and founded the LLM optimization and scaling team. Together, we built a highly scalable pretraining stack that enabled the successful training of Seed 2.0 and the subsequent frontier-scale models, significantly advancing our ability to train and iterate on frontier AI systems at scale.

I'm deeply grateful to my teammates, collaborators, and leadership for an incredibly rewarding journey.

The best model is yet to come.

Scaling continues!