PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Yonghui Wu

Also known as Wu Yonghui

As of October 2026, Yonghui Wu heads ByteDance Seed. He completed a computer-science doctorate and a statistics master's at the University of California, Riverside after graduating from Nanjing University, and he joined Google in 2008 as a software engineer. From 2014 to 2023 he worked in Google Brain on machine learning, genomics, and natural language understanding. He was the first author of the 2016 paper on Google's Neural Machine Translation system, which reduced translation errors by an average of 60 percent compared with the phrase-based production system. In 2023 he was named Google Fellow and served as vice president of research at DeepMind, and in February 2025 he joined ByteDance to lead AI research from San Jose, reporting to chief executive Liang Rubo.

Now at
ByteDance
Works
287
Citations
32,731
h-index
72

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 17 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2008

    From Riverside to Google

    He completes a computer-science doctorate and a statistics master's at the University of California, Riverside after graduating from Nanjing University, and he joins Google in 2008 as a software engineer.

  2. 2014–2023

    Research in Google Brain

    Between 2014 and 2023 he works in Google Brain on machine learning, genomics, and natural language understanding.

  3. 2016

    Neural machine translation

    He is the first author of the 2016 paper on Google's Neural Machine Translation system, which reduces translation errors by an average of 60 percent compared with the phrase-based production system.

  4. December 2017

    End-to-end speech recognition

    In December 2017 he and Tara Sainath report an end-to-end speech system with a word error rate of 5.6 percent, a 16 percent relative improvement over a strong conventional system at 6.7 percent.

  5. 2023

    Google Fellow at DeepMind

    In 2023 he is named Google Fellow and serves as vice president of research at DeepMind.

  6. February 2025

    AI research at ByteDance

    In February 2025 he joins ByteDance to lead AI research, based in San Jose, and reports to chief executive Liang Rubo.

  7. As of October 2026

    Head of ByteDance Seed

    As of October 2026 he heads ByteDance Seed, and Yan Lin leads its new model-alignment and preparedness department, reporting to him.

Sources and credits

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  1. Veteran Google AI researcher joins Chinese TikTok owner ByteDance in leadership role finance.yahoo.com. Checked 16 October 2026.
  2. Yonghui Wu - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 16 October 2026.
  3. Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation arxiv.org. Checked 16 October 2026.
  4. Improving End-to-End Models For Speech Recognition research.google. Checked 16 October 2026.
  5. Google's 17 year veteran Wu Yonghui joins ByteDance to lead AI research thehindu.com. Checked 16 October 2026.
  6. ByteDance's Seed AI lab creates dedicated model safety and alignment department technode.com. Checked 16 October 2026.