Guo Daya joins ByteDance Seed as the head of agents with an annual salary close to 100 million yuan, after Alibaba and Tencent previously competed for the position.

ME News Report, April 16 (UTC+8), confirms that former DeepSeek researcher Guo Daya has joined ByteDance’s large model development team Seed, serving as one of the agent leads, with a level of L8. His total compensation package consists of cash, ByteDance options, and Doubao shares, which require meeting certain conditions to be fully vested. According to late estimates, if Doubao share prices continue to rise, the total gains after the four-year vesting period could reach hundreds of millions of yuan, averaging nearly 100 million yuan annually. Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance have all approached Guo Daya in succession, with Alibaba even offering the position of post-training lead. He ultimately chose ByteDance mainly because his research focus aligned: he had planned to leave DeepSeek as early as October last year, partly due to optimism about the agent direction, which DeepSeek at the time did not prioritize. Previously, the level of treatment he received was comparable to that of Yao Shunyu, who was recruited by Tencent to take charge of the overall situation in a critical moment, indicating that the agent direction has significantly increased its strategic importance within major tech companies. With his arrival, Seed is initiating organizational integration focused on agents and coding. A staff member close to the team told LatePost that by the end of 2025, every time ByteDance trains a Code model, “they say it’s the last time.” At the end of January this year, ByteDance CEO Liang Rupo listed AI model capabilities as a top priority for 2026 during a company-wide meeting, and the nearly 100 million yuan investment in Guo Daya directly reflects this strategic shift. (Source: BlockBeats)