Recently, Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen submitted labor arbitration against its former employee Zhou Chang, accusing him of violating a non-compete agreement by joining ByteDance. Zhou Chang now faces heavy compensation claims from Tongyi.

Zhou Chang was the technical lead for Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen's large model. With a Ph.D. in Computer Software and Theory from Peking University, he joined Alibaba in 2017 and was responsible for developing the M6 series of multimodal pre-training models (with up to 100 billion parameters, the largest model in the history of multimodal pre-training) and the OFA series of general multimodal AI models, making significant contributions to the company.

In July of this year, Zhou Chang resigned citing entrepreneurial reasons and signed a non-compete agreement. Amidst industry speculation about his entrepreneurial direction and progress, and as various investment institutions attempted to engage with him, it was revealed that Zhou Chang had joined ByteDance's AI-related department in August.

ByteDance has been recruiting talent related to large models from various major companies and university laboratories since the end of last year. It is said that Zhang Yiming personally participated in the global recruitment efforts.

It is reported that Zhou Chang may be responsible for AI hardware at ByteDance with a job level of approximately 4-2. Based on the current job level alignment among major internet companies, ByteDance's 4-2 level roughly corresponds to Alibaba's P11. In other words, Zhou Chang's move to ByteDance essentially represents a two-level promotion, with substantial salary and benefits.