Shi Yunfeng, who leads ByteDance’s AI chip and data processing unit teams, has submitted his resignation and is handing over his responsibilities, LatePost reported. Shi joined ByteDance in 2018 and reports to Yang Zhenyuan, who heads the company’s cloud business, Volcano Engine.
ByteDance began building its AI chip team in 2019 and pursued a custom accelerator modeled on Google’s Tensor Processing Units. The aim was to improve performance and power efficiency for its own AI workloads. The chip reached tape-out this year, but its performance fell short of expectations, according to the report. The team is now developing a successor. [LatePost, in Chinese]