Gu Quanquan, a core researcher of ByteDance's Seed team, has confirmed his resignation. Gu Quanquan recently posted on a social media platform that the day was his last day at the Seed team and reflected on his research achievements in AI-driven drug discovery and large language model pretraining over the past three years. This departure comes as ByteDance's AI business accelerates its commercialization, drawing attention from the outside world to the AI for Science (AI4S) startup trend.

In the direction of AI in drug development, Gu Quanquan led the development of the bio-molecular structure prediction model SeedFold, which outperformed AlphaFold3 in multiple public benchmark tests; he also launched the protein binder design model SeedProteo and the DPLIV series of protein language models, promoting the application of AI in protein design and drug development. In early 2025, his focus shifted to large language model pretraining, where he established an LLM optimization and expansion team, building a highly scalable pretraining infrastructure to support the training of large-scale models such as Seed2.0.

Regarding discussions about his position and reasons for leaving, a relevant person from ByteDance's Seed team responded that Gu Quanquan had participated in work related to bio-molecular structure prediction and LLM pretraining, but was not the head of AI drug development or pretraining businesses, and the company is not aware of his subsequent entrepreneurial plans. However, industry insiders generally believe he is expected to join the AI4S startup sector, focusing on AI drug development, protein design, and drug discovery platforms, and has already attracted the attention of leading investment institutions.