ChainThink report, April 15: According to monitoring by Dongsai Beating, Liu Jiang, co-founder of Turing Education, revealed today on the X platform that Guo Daya, a core researcher at DeepSeek, has joined ByteDance.

Guo Daya, born in 1995, holds a Ph.D. from Sun Yat-sen University, jointly supervised by Professor Yinjian and Dr. Zhou Ming from Microsoft Asia Research Institute, and was awarded the Microsoft PhD Fellowship in 2020. After joining DeepSeek in July 2023, he served as the first author of the DeepSeek-R1 paper—the most influential model developed by DeepSeek—demonstrating for the first time that pure reinforcement learning can unlock reasoning capabilities in large language models, with the corresponding paper featured on the cover of Nature.

Guo Daya's departure from DeepSeek in March had previously been confirmed by multiple media outlets, though his new destination remained undisclosed. While Baidu was rumored to be his next stop, Baidu explicitly denied this, confirming only that other DeepSeek team members have joined. If Liu Jiang’s disclosure is accurate, Guo Daya will become the second top-tier AI researcher to join ByteDance’s Seed team following Yu Bowen, former lead trainer of Tongyi Qianwen.