The big tech “AI for Science” team ultimately couldn’t keep its people—splitting off to start their own businesses, then upping the bet with a US dollar fund infusion. This script feels familiar.

CryptoWorld News: Seed’s AI for Science (AI4S) team, an AI R&D unit under ByteDance, is discussing a new round of organizational restructuring, and is even considering a split from ByteDance. Key team members Xiao Wenzhi and Gu Quanquan have left to found an AI pharmaceutical company, with their entrepreneurial direction focused on protein design and a drug discovery platform, and they have already received multiple rounds of funding from top U.S. institutions. The team’s core achievements include the open-source reproduction work for Alphafold 3, Protenix, and Pxdesign, which has surpassed Alphaproteo in protein binder design. Pxdesign achieved a nanomolar-level binding hit rate of 20% to 73% on 5 of 6 different protein targets.