Chinese social media giant ByteDance, the owner of TikTok and Douyin, has ramped up recruitment of fresh talent for robotics development, as a growing number of artificial intelligence (AI) engineers are being lured by high pay to work in the fast-evolving sector.
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The more than 10 job vacancies recently posted on ByteDance’s website included two directors responsible for robot products and for hardware-embedded AI models.
The Beijing-based unicorn also posted vacancies for roles involving “robot motion control algorithms”, “performance optimisation for embodied intelligence reasoning” and “robot multimodal model”, among others.
Many of those posts mentioned that the company had been working on a “new product”, with one vacancy specifically describing the product as a “next-generation general-purpose robot”.
All the job vacancies are for roles in Beijing and Shanghai under ByteDance’s Seed department, which oversees the company’s AI research and large language model development. The department was established in 2023, following OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 that sparked a global arms race in generative AI.
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ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
The company’s latest recruitment drive appears to reflect how founder Zhang Yiming remains involved in AI-related initiatives, as the Seed department is expected to surpass 300 employees this year.