Xiaomi forms AI4Materials team, with ByteDance AI4S early employee Yu Zhi'ao appointed as the head

ME News report: On June 24 (UTC+8), according to Beating monitoring, Yu Zhi’ao, an early employee of ByteDance’s AI4S team and co-founder of Silicon Valley battery startup Feon Energy, has recently joined Xiaomi Group and will serve as the head of the Materials Core team. AI4Materials and Materials Core are Xiaomi’s next strategic layout in cutting-edge technology following its in-house large model development. They focus on the coordination and integration of AI and materials, as well as frontier materials R&D, covering various new materials directions needed by Xiaomi Group.

Yu Zhi’ao graduated from Peking University and obtained a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Stanford University. During his Ph.D. program, he interned at Tesla, and he has also served as an AI + materials advisor at DeepVision Technology.

Recently, the AI + materials field has attracted widespread attention across the industry, and both the China and U.S. markets have seen investment opportunities emerge. Overseas, Project Prometheus, led by Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon), who serves as Co-CEO, has already raised over $12 billion. In China, Deep Principle has reportedly accumulated nearly 1 billion RMB in funding, and Kaiwu Ji also completed more than 1 billion RMB in funding around the 2026 Spring Festival with a very fast pace. In addition, major players such as Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Alibaba DAMO Academy, and ByteDance have all set up related teams internally.

(Source: BlockBeats)