Big model "six tigers" personnel turmoil! Twelve executives left the company in half a year

In the first half of this year, the "big modelSix Little Tigers"In the wisdom spectrum, MiniMax, zero one million things, Baichuan Intelligence, step leap star five companies, a total of 13 AI executive changes were exposed, of which 12 out, 1 new entry, and the first half of the domestic large manufacturers of AI talent changes in the number of comparable (domestic large manufacturers of AI talent migration atlas: half a year of 19 AI bulls changes!) .

Among them, Baichuan Intelligence, Zero One Everything, and Wisdom Spectrum involved more executive changes, with three, three, and five, respectively. There are a number of unicorns leaving the core executives who are the head of commercialization, including Zhang Fan, COO of Wisdom Spectrum, Wei Wei, partner and vice president of commercialization of MiniMax, and Hong Tao, co-founder and head of commercialization of Baichuan Intelligence, who had previously left the company.

It is worth noting that the five companies out of the executives, has been publicized the latest movements can be divided into two categories: return to the big factory, AI field entrepreneurship. Zero one million things co-founder, vice president of technology Dai Zonghong, the wisdom of the spectrum of chief operating officer Zhang Fan's new business project also won the "old boss" zero one million things, the wisdom of the spectrum of investment.

In addition to the new changes this year, as early as the end of last year, DeepSeek and ranked in the "big model of the six tigers" of the dark side of the moon has occurred in the senior personnel changes. In November last year, the dark side of the month of the big model product leader Wang Guan, Noisee product leader Ming Chao Ping three overseas product leader was exposed to leave the business; at the end of last year, millet was exposed to ten million annual salary to poach DeepSeek-V2 one of the core developers Luo Fuli rushed on the hot spot, but according to Red Star News quoted his relatives, Luo Fuli in February this year has been employed by the new company, did not mention whether the official The company's newest product is a new company, and it's not clear whether it's official.

In the first half of 2025, there were 12 exits of executives from large domestic model unicorns:

In the first half of 2025, there was one new executive who joined a large domestic model unicorn:

I. Smart Spectrum: Head of commercialization leaves, brings in former Midjourney execs

Wisdom Spectrum has had the most executive movements, with 4 executives leaving and 1 coming on board.

Wisdom Spectrum Chief Strategy Officer Zhang Cuo and Vice President Qu Teng left the company in January this year, both of whom had been responsible for the financing process of different spin-offs of Wisdom Spectrum in 2024, and whose new directions are currently unknown. On the eve of their departure, at the end of 2024, Smart Spectrum announced that it had completed a new round of financing of 3 billion RMB.Zhongguancun neighborhood of Beijing, containing Beijing University, famous for electronics shops and bookstores(5.300, -0.08, -1.49%)Science City Corporation led the investment, followed by Tencent Investment, Sequoia China, Shunwei Capital and Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund. Smart Spectrum has responded that the departure of the two men will not affect the overall financing of Smart Spectrum.

▲Wise Spectrum VP Quyten (Source: COP28)

In February of this year, Huizi Li, Vice President of AI and Cooperation of Wiseplan Apps, left the company. She joined in July last year and was responsible for strategic planning and commercial cooperation of C-end products, and announced her departure in less than half a year, and her new move has not yet been made public. Before joining Smart Spectrum, she had served as investment director at Meituan, and was responsible for Smart Spectrum's project investment.

One of the top executives departing Wisdom Spectrum this month is Wisdom Spectrum's chief operating officer, Zhang Fan, who was responsible for Wisdom Spectrum's commercialization. Following his departure, Zhang Fan will be working atAI AgentThe field of entrepreneurship, Zhi Spectrum official said, Zhang Fan's entrepreneurial project is part of the Zhi Spectrum MaaS platform ecosystem, will help Zhi Spectrum model to complete the "last kilometer" of the transformation of the new project has been supported by Zhi Spectrum investment.

▲Zhang Fan, Chief Operating Officer of Smart Spectrum (Source: Tencent Research Institute)

In addition, in January this year, Wisdom Spectrum also has a former Midjourney executive to join, Midjourney's former vice president of Asia, Wang Yue Ting, will be responsible for Wisdom Spectrum's multimodal products and marketing. This may mean that Jipo will focus on the C-end market. Last year, Midjourney also introduced Hu Yunhua, a former researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, a senior technologist at Ali Dharma Institute, and the chief data officer of Alipay China, to be the person in charge of the C-end application, "Midjourney Clear Words".

▲Midjourney's former Vice President for Asia, Wang Yue Ting (Source: Tsinghua University Academy of Fine Arts)

Second, MiniMax: commercial head out, official said B-side business to meet the new development stage

In February, one of the heads of commercialization for MiniMax left the company.

MiniMax out of the executive is a partner, the company's vice president, open platform head Wei Wei, who is responsible for To B commercialization in the company, the new trend is not disclosed. MiniMax responded that MiniMax domestic B-side business ushered in a new stage of development, and will be led by other responsible persons to continue to improve the technical capabilities of the team. Before joining Minimax, Wei Wei served as vice president of Tencent Cloud.

▲MiniMaxWei Wei, Partner, Corporate Vice President, Head of Open Platform (Source: Lenovo)

According to MiniMax's official website, the company owns products such as Conch AI, Starfield, and Talkie on the To C side, and on the To B side, it has accessed more than 50,000 enterprise customers and individual developers through its open platform products.

After Wei Wei's departure, MiniMax announced in mid-March that it had split its business for the C-suite, and MiniMax's AI app formerly known as "Conch AI" was officially renamed "MiniMax", with the domestic and international versions synchronized.In June, according to an exclusive disclosure by HuffPost, MiniMax has been preparing for more than half a year to launch its AI app. In June, MiniMax exclusively disclosed that it had been preparing for more than half a year to launch the text of "MiniMax".inference modelComing soon.

In September last year, MiniMax product leader Zhang Qianchuan, for personal reasons, faded out of the company's affairs, instead of product consultants.

Three, zero one million things: three core executives left, the joint venture left to start a business by the Innovation Workshop investment

In the past six months, Zero One Everything has seen three departing executives, including two co-founders and one program leader.

Blue Yuchuan, the head of the AI video mixing program at Zero One Everything, was revealed to have left the company in February of this year, with a new project, SparkView, as theAI video editing tools. He has been in charge of the big model API open platform, PopAi and Mona product growth, and AI video mixing project at Zero One Everything. It is understood that the financing of his new project has been opened.

▲Lan Yuchuan, head of the AI video mixing program at Zero One Thing (Source: Zero One Thing)

In May of this year, the co-founder of the zero one million things Gu Xuemei left the company to prepare for entrepreneurship. Gu Xuemei and Kai-Fu Li first met at Google, she is a former Google China female engineer, but also Kai-Fu Li to form the core of the big model startup team. She was in charge of modeling and training and C-end products at Zero One Thousand Things, and had led the launch of PopAi, an overseas AI office application, and Mona, an overseas emotional companion product.

▲Gu Xuemei, co-founder of Zero One Everything (Source: Rookie Network)

In May this year, Dai Zonghong, co-founder and vice president of technology of Zero One Thousand Things, also announced his departure, however, the official response of Zero One Thousand Things said that Dai Zonghong started his own business again with the support of Innovation Workshop. He was in charge of the AI Infra team in Zero One Thousand Things, mainly to solve the system bottleneck in high-volume parallel training, before joining Zero One Thousand Things, he served as Huawei Cloud AI CTO and Minister of Technological Innovation, and director of AI Infra in Ali Dharma Institute.

▲Dai Zonghong, Co-Founder and VP of Technology, ZeroOneWorld (Source: Rare Earth Developer Conference)

Gu Xuemei, Dai Zonghong two co-creators of the departure may be related to the strategic adjustment of zero one million things, since the fourth quarter of last year, zero one million things announced that we should focus on the parameters of moderate, faster inference, inference cost is lower, and more commercial prospects for the lightweight model, to give up the mega-model training program.

In fact, Zero One Everything started a wave of executive departures last year, with co-founders and core members leaving one after another.

In December 2023, Li Xiangang, co-founder and vice president of technology of Zero One Everything, left to return to Shell; in August 2024, Huang Wenhao, vice president of algorithms, joined the Seed team of ByteDance; in 2024, Cao Dapeng, the head of PopAi products, left to join ByteDance as the head of the mobile end of the i.e. Dream AI; at the end of 2024, Pan Xin, the co-founder and chief architect, left to join the Flash Pole AI as a partner.

Fourth, Baichuan Intelligence: several Sogou system executives left, was exposed to the abolition of the financial group

In April 2023, Baichuan Intelligence joined hands with a number of Sogou team veterans to set up Baichuan Intelligence, which was established 1 month ago, and got a joint deluxe investment from Tencent, Xiaomi, Kingsoft, Tsinghua University Asset Management Company Limited, and more than a dozen organizations such as Good Future; more than ten large models were issued in a year.

However, nowadays, among the core executives of Baichuan Intelligence, the Sogou system, in addition to Baichuan Intelligence founder and CEO Wang Xiaochuan, only co-founder and president Ru Liyun remains.

In December last year, Baichuan Intelligence co-founder and head of commercialization Hong Tao, head of Internet business Jiao has left. At present, Hong Tao's new direction is unknown, and Jiao can already devote himself to AI voice direction entrepreneurship.

▲ Hong Tao, co-founder and head of commercialization of Baichuan Intelligence, and Jiao Ke, head of Internet business (Source: Pulse, Keystone Capital)

In March of this year, Baichuan Intelligence co-founder and model R & D head Chen Weipeng was exposed to be going through the process of leaving the company, and has begun to prepare for the start-up project in the direction of AI Coding. Chen Weipeng joined the company at the early stage of the founding of Baichuan Intelligence, worked with Wang Xiaochuan in Sogou, served as general manager of research and development of Sogou search, responsible for the development of general search, vertical search and recommendation system.

▲Wang Xiaochuan, Founder and CEO of Baichuan Intelligence (first from left), Chen Weipeng, Co-founder and Head of Model R&D of Baichuan Intelligence (second from right)

The other two executives who left the company in March this year were Deng Jiang, business partner and president of the financial business group of Baichuan Intelligence, and Li Governance, vice president of Baichuan Intelligent Healthcare. Deng Jiang has announced that he has joined Nortel Digital Intelligence as Vice President of Industry, and Li Governance's latest move is unknown.

▲Deng Jiang, Business Partner and President of Financial Business Group, BCinks Intelligence (left), and Lee Governance, Vice President of Healthcare, BCinks Intelligence (right)

Baichuan Intelligence is not only facing the departure of several core executives, its own business is also undergoing a major strategic adjustment.

Wang Xiaochuan mentioned in the second anniversary of the full staff letter that Baichuan Intelligence is going to focus on the medical direction, and develop applications and services around the four aspects of Baichuan Xiaoying, AI pediatrics, AI general medicine, and precision medicine. According to Smart Surge, on February 18, the PE team (cue word engineering team) of Baichuan Intelligence's To B business team was transferred to the production and research group of the overarching algorithm team, and on March 3, its B-side group responsible for the To B business in the financial industry was abolished, and the employees signed a separation agreement on the same day.

V. Step Star: multimodal model core figure leaves, recruited by Jingdong

Just last week, Duan Nan, the person in charge of the Step Star video generation model, was revealed to have left his job to join Jingdong as the head of the Vision and Multimodal Laboratory of the Exploration Research Institute, focusing on the development of visual and multimodal basic models. Duan Nan was previously a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and research manager of the natural language computing team.

▲Duan Nan, Head of Step Star Video Generation Model (Source: Global Machine Learning Technology Conference)

Step Star is the only enterprise that focuses on multi-modal big models among the six small dragons in China, and since its establishment in 2023, it has released 16 multi-modal big models covering voice, image, video, music and other directions, and Duan Nan is officially one of the core figures of its multi-modal strategy.

In addition, it can be seen that Jingdong is increasing AI investment, there have been a number of industry bulls have joined, including Baidu search chief architect Kusmu, Alibaba partner andAnt GroupFormer CTO Hu Xi, former Shangtang VP Shen Hui and others.

Conclusion: Executive exodus, business restructuring, big model unicorns break their arms to survive

In 2023 the domestic big model entrepreneurial boom emerged, a large number of AI bulls chose to enter the business and absorbed huge financing, giving birth to many unicorns.

However, since last year, the personnel changes and business adjustments of these startups have been quite frequent: some have continued to raise large sums of money and accelerated the IPO process, some have chosen to give up the training of ultra-large parameter scale models and switch to lightweight model deployment, and some have chosen to focus on a certain area of medical care and other strengths ...... There are also a number of startups whose early members and core executives have announced that they are leaving the business or returning to the big firms. Leaving to start a business or returning to the big factory, the departure of a number of heads of commercialization may be evidence that their overall business is facing a bottleneck.

It can be seen that the flow of AI talent tide is still continuing, some executives of the entrepreneurial project has become part of the overall business of its "old boss", the unicorn itself to reduce the burden at the same time, the abolition of its business line or core talent can feed its commercialization process.

Source: Smart Stuff