ByteDance Downsizes Doubao AI Chat Team After Reaching 200 Million Daily Active Users
ByteDance is reportedly downsizing its Doubao AI chat session and post-training teams, cutting the general chat team by half despite the app exceeding 200 million daily active users. Under the leadership of Zhao Qi, affected staff are being reassigned to commercialization and Feishu product teams or laid off as the company shifts focus toward efficiency and monetization. The restructuring highlights a broader shift in the consumer AI industry, where massive user acquisition is no longer sufficient without clear commercialization pathways. By pivoting resources from general chat capabilities toward commercial applications and enterprise tools, ByteDance aims to overcome monetization bottlenecks facing consumer large language model products. In addition to downsizing the 50-person general session team, ByteDance consolidated multiple small models supporting Doubao's chat feature into a single model around June to streamline operations. Furthermore, members of the Product Posttrain-Chat team under ByteDance's Seed AI unit are being reassigned to reinforcement learning (Horizon RL) and workplace product teams.
## BACKGROUND
Doubao is ByteDance's flagship conversational AI assistant powered by Seed, ByteDance's internal AI research unit dedicated to foundation models. Post-training is a crucial phase in LLM development where base language models are refined using techniques like supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to follow human instructions and handle specific chat applications effectively.