# Liang Rubo

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/liang_rubo
> Updated: 2026-06-08
> Categories: Chinese AI, People
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), a free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Quote with attribution.

Liang Rubo (Chinese: 梁汝波; born 1983) is a Chinese technology executive who is the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of [ByteDance](/wiki/bytedance), the Beijing-based company behind the short-video apps [Douyin](/wiki/douyin) and [TikTok](/wiki/tiktok) and the artificial intelligence assistant [Doubao](/wiki/doubao). He became ByteDance's chief executive in November 2021, succeeding the company's better-known founder [Zhang Yiming](/wiki/zhang_yiming), who was his university roommate and longtime business partner.[1][6]

Liang kept a low public profile for most of his career and has rarely, if ever, given a media interview.[1] He became more visible inside the company after 2024, when he used a series of internal all-hands speeches to warn that ByteDance had been slow to react to generative AI and to reorient the firm around large language models and the Doubao product line.[7][8] TIME named him to its 2024 list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence.[9] The table below summarizes his principal roles at ByteDance.

| Period | Role at ByteDance |
| --- | --- |
| 2012 to 2016 | Co-founder; head of product research and development (Toutiao, advertising systems) |
| 2016 to 2019 | Head of the Lark collaboration platform and Efficiency Engineering |
| 2019 to 2021 | Head of human resources and corporate management |
| November 2021 to present | Chairman and chief executive officer |

## Education

Liang was born in 1983 in Yichun, in the southern Chinese province of Jiangxi.[3] In 2001 he enrolled at [Nankai University](/wiki/nankai_university) in Tianjin, where he studied microelectronics and graduated in 2005.[3] He and Zhang Yiming were classmates in the same 2001 cohort and shared a dormitory.[1][2] By Zhang's later account the two became close after sharing a desktop computer in their dorm, spending four years studying together and playing badminton and table tennis.[2] Both men have remained connected to the school: in August 2024 they jointly donated 200 million yuan (about US$28 million) to Nankai University to support mathematics research and talent development, a rare public gesture from the two famously low-key founders.[1]

## ByteDance founding and early roles

After graduating, Liang worked as an engineer, including a stint as a principal engineer at the semiconductor-software company Accelicon Technologies.[3] In 2009 he reunited with Zhang to build Jiujiufang, a real estate search platform that became one of China's more widely downloaded property apps.[2][3] The two were still running that business in 2012 when they began developing the news-recommendation app Jinri Toutiao at night, reportedly working on the two products from a shared apartment in Beijing's Zhongguancun technology district.[2]

Liang co-founded ByteDance with Zhang in March 2012 and was a member of the founding team.[1][16] In the company's early years he led product research and development, overseeing core systems including the [Toutiao](/wiki/toutiao) recommendation engine and the advertising platform from 2012 to 2016.[3] From 2016 he ran the enterprise collaboration tool [Lark](/wiki/lark) (known in China as Feishu) and an internal Efficiency Engineering group.[3][5] He later took charge of human resources and corporate management, the portfolio he held when Zhang chose him as successor; by then ByteDance's workforce had grown past 100,000 people.[5] Colleagues and Zhang himself have described Liang as an "executor" and an organizational builder, the person who set up the company's recruitment, policies, and management systems while Zhang focused on product vision.[2] Liang has been associated with Zhang's "Always day one" management ethos, the idea of treating every workday as the company's first.[2]

## Chief executive

On May 20, 2021, Zhang Yiming announced that he would step down as chief executive and hand the role to Liang, with a roughly six-month transition so the two could overlap.[4][5] Zhang said he lacked some of the qualities of an ideal manager and was more interested in analyzing organizational and market principles than in managing people day to day; he indicated he would shift toward long-term strategy and corporate culture.[4][18] At the time of the announcement Liang was the head of human resources, the executive responsible for ByteDance's global staff.[5]

The handover was completed on November 4, 2021, when Zhang formally stepped down as chief executive.[18] In the same leadership reshuffle Zhang also relinquished the chairmanship, and Liang took over both the chief executive and chairman roles.[1][6] Liang inherited a company under heavy regulatory pressure at home and intense geopolitical scrutiny abroad, including recurring disputes over the ownership and future of TikTok in the United States.[9] Throughout this period he remained largely out of public view, a deliberately reticent figure in contrast to the more visible founders of rival Chinese technology firms.[1]

## AI strategy

ByteDance launched the Doubao chatbot in August 2023.[8] In a company-wide meeting in January 2024, Liang delivered an unusually blunt assessment, telling employees to adopt a sense of crisis and acknowledging that ByteDance had been late to the generative AI wave. He noted that staff only began seriously discussing [ChatGPT](/wiki/chatgpt), built by [OpenAI](/wiki/openai), in 2023, well after the technology had emerged, and warned that a lack of speed and sensitivity to external change risked turning ByteDance into a "mediocre organization."[7][8] To illustrate the point he cited a task that had been estimated at 1,000 person-days but was completed in about 15 after closer review.[8]

Liang reorganized the company's AI research around a lab named Seed, which handles foundation-model research, alongside a separate group focused on AI products.[10] In early 2025 ByteDance recruited Wu Yonghui, a former Google research leader, to head Seed, reporting directly to Liang, as the company responded to competitive pressure from rivals such as [DeepSeek](/wiki/deepseek).[11] Under this structure ByteDance built out a broad portfolio: the Doubao model family that powers the Doubao app, the open-weight seed-oss models, the Seedream text-to-image system, the Seedance video model (with Seedance 2.0 released in February 2026), and the creative tool [Jimeng](/wiki/jimeng) for AI image and video generation.[16] Its cloud unit, [Volcano Engine](/wiki/volcano_engine), sells the Doubao models to enterprise customers, and ByteDance has competed aggressively on price in China's model market.[16]

The strategy produced rapid consumer adoption. Doubao became one of China's most downloaded and most used AI applications, passing 100 million cumulative downloads by September 2024, exceeding 100 million daily active users by the end of 2025, and reaching roughly 345 million monthly active users by early 2026, the leading homegrown AI app in China ahead of competitors such as DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, and Tencent's Yuanbao.[13][14] An international version of the assistant is offered under the name Cici.[13]

Liang has made AI the company's central priority. At the February 2025 all-hands meeting he set ByteDance's annual goals as pursuing "the upper limit of intelligence," exploring new forms of interaction, and strengthening economies of scale, again conceding that the company had moved more slowly than AI startups.[12] For 2026 he framed the corporate theme around scaling new heights, with the Doubao assistant ecosystem as the most important near-term objective.[17] To support that push, ByteDance became one of the world's largest spenders on AI infrastructure: news reports in late 2025 put its planned 2026 capital expenditure at around 160 billion yuan or more, roughly US$23 billion, with about half earmarked for AI chips, including a reported plan to buy some US$14 billion of Nvidia processors (an initial order of about 20,000 H200 graphics units) if Chinese regulators permit the sales.[14][15] Liang also expanded compensation and talent budgets to compete for scarce AI researchers.[12]

Liang remains chairman and chief executive of ByteDance, one of the world's most valuable private technology companies, valued at roughly US$300 billion in late 2024 and reported in subsequent 2025 share transactions at well above US$400 billion.[16] A dollar billionaire through his ByteDance stake, he continues to keep a deliberately low personal profile.[1]

## References

1. South China Morning Post. "ByteDance's low-profile founders donate US$28 million to alma mater Nankai University." August 2024. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3275281/bytedances-low-profile-founders-donate-us28-million-alma-mater-nankai-university
2. KrASIA. "Meet Liang Rubo, the 'executor' and former roommate of Zhang Yiming who's ready to take over at ByteDance." 2021. https://kr-asia.com/liang-rubo-the-executor-and-former-roommate-of-zhang-yiming-ready-to-take-over-as-ceo-at-bytedance
3. Baidu Baike. "Liang Rubo." https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Liang%20Rubo/14528
4. Al Jazeera. "ByteDance CEO steps down, chooses college roommate as successor." May 20, 2021. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/5/20/bytedance-ceo-steps-down-chooses-college-roommate-as-successor
5. Yicai Global. "HR Chief Liang Rubo to Lead ByteDance After Zhang Yiming Steps Down as CEO in 2021." 2021. https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/hr-chief-liang-rubo-to-lead-bytedance-after-zhang-yiming-steps-down-as-ceo-in-2021
6. CNBC. "ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming steps down as chairman amid reshuffle." November 3, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/03/bytedance-founder-zhang-yiming-steps-down-as-chairman-amid-reshuffle.html
7. Bloomberg. "ByteDance Was Late to AI Party, CEO Says in All-Hands Meeting." January 31, 2024. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/tiktok-parent-bytedance-fell-behind-in-ai-ceo-says-in-echo-of-jack-ma-jd-s-liu
8. Fortune. "ByteDance CEO complains company risks mediocrity by missing AI wave." February 1, 2024. https://fortune.com/asia/2024/02/01/bytedance-ceo-liang-rubo-memo-to-employees-missed-ai-wave-tencent-pony-ma-alibaba-jd/
9. TIME. "Liang Rubo: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2024." 2024. https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012773/liang-rubo/
10. Pandaily. "ByteDance Adjusts AI Department 'Seed', Yonghui Wu Becomes New Head." 2025. https://pandaily.com/bytedance-adjusts-ai-department-seed-yonghui-wu-becomes-new-head/
11. Reuters (via Yahoo Finance). "ByteDance restructures AI division, hiring new expert from Google amid DeepSeek pressure." 2025. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bytedance-restructures-ai-division-hiring-093000262.html
12. Yicai Global. "ByteDance Was Too Slow in Seizing AI Opportunities, CEO Says." February 2025. https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/bytedance-was-too-slow-in-seizing-ai-opportunities-ceo-says
13. TechNode. "ByteDance's Doubao reaches 100M DAU with minimal marketing spend." December 25, 2025. https://technode.com/2025/12/25/bytedances-doubao-reaches-100m-dau-with-minimal-marketing-spend/
14. South China Morning Post. "ByteDance to pour US$14 billion into Nvidia chips in 2026 as computing demand surges." 2025. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3338191/bytedance-pour-us14-billion-nvidia-chips-2026-computing-demand-surges
15. Investing.com (Reuters). "ByteDance plans to lift AI spending to $23 bln in 2026, FT reports." 2025. https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/bytedance-plans-to-lift-ai-spending-to-23-bln-in-2026-ft-reports-4420503
16. Wikipedia. "ByteDance." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance
17. TMTPOST. "ByteDance CEO Says the Company's Primary Focus is Doubao." 2026. https://en.tmtpost.com/post/7861725
18. Wikipedia. "Zhang Yiming." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Yiming