Kuaishou is witnessing another significant change in its core leadership. On December 30, news emerged that Zhou Guorui, Vice President of Kuaishou Technology and head of the foundational large model and recommendation model, is set to leave the company. It is understood that his internal system status has already been changed to "On Leave," and his personal signature has been updated to "Log Out." As of the time of writing, Kuaishou has not issued an official response to the matter. During the Q1 2025 earnings call, Cheng Yixiao, the company's founder and CEO, explicitly identified AI as Kuaishou's "second growth curve." Currently, Zhou Guorui's departure is touching a sensitive nerve in the market regarding the continuity of Kuaishou's AI strategy. Zhou Guorui's four-year tenure at Kuaishou coincided with the critical phase of the company's AI strategy, from its inception to full-scale advancement. A master's graduate from the Pattern Recognition Laboratory at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, he previously served as a Senior Algorithm Expert at Alimama, focusing on the application of deep learning in ad ranking. After joining Kuaishou in 2021, Zhou Guorui quickly became a central figure in the company's AI technological innovation, particularly in the optimization of its recommendation systems. His most notable contribution was leading the development of the generative end-to-end recommendation architecture, OneRec. This system overturned the traditional "cascading" architecture of multi-stage拼接 in recommendation systems, achieving a breakthrough of "larger models at lower costs" through unified modeling and链路 compression. According to public information, this system reduced service costs to one-tenth of the original and has been fully deployed across several core business scenarios, including short videos, local lifestyle services, and e-commerce. As per Kuaishou's Q3 2025 financial report, OneRec significantly enhanced advertising matching efficiency by uncovering the "deep correlations between user behavior and marketing conversions," driving a 14% year-on-year increase in domestic online marketing services revenue. However, Kuaishou's AI strategy is currently facing a situation of frequent turnover among core personnel. Zhou Guorui's departure is not an isolated incident but rather a continuation of an exodus of senior technical executives that has persisted for over half a year. According to incomplete statistics, since 2025, several vice president-level technical executives have left Kuaishou, covering core areas such as recommendation algorithms, multimodal technology, and commercialization. In August, Zhang Di, Vice President and head of large models, confirmed his departure, with his responsibilities being assumed concurrently by Senior Vice President Gai Kun. Furthermore, this wave of departures has included Yuan Shuai, Vice President of Magnetic Engine; Wang Zhongyuan, head of multimodal; Liu Qi, Chief Audio-Video Architect; Fu Ruiji, head of Tech Knowledge Graph and Large Model Agent Technology; and former Kuaishou Vice President and head of recommendation algorithms, Song Yang. While AI technical executives are departing frequently, the platform's technical defenses are also facing severe tests. On the evening of December 22, Kuaishou experienced a severe automated attack from "black and grey industries." A large number of non-compliant live-streaming rooms emerged within a short period, breaching the platform's security defenses and ultimately forcing the company to implement a "circuit-breaker" measure by temporarily suspending all live-streaming functions. This security incident, which lasted over 90 minutes, exposed shortcomings in the platform's real-time monitoring and emergency response mechanisms when dealing with new types of AI-driven, automated attacks. This security event, combined with the wave of executive departures, has amplified market concerns. Internally, persistent talent drain could erode the foundation of its long-term technological innovation and strategic coherence; externally, the stable operation of its vast ecosystem is facing increasingly complex new threats. There are indications that after leaving Kuaishou, Zhou Guorui may join Meta or TikTok, which to some extent reflects the intense global competition among tech companies for top AI talent. Recently, companies like ByteDance have officially announced a new round of salary increases, further escalating the industry's competition for AI talent to new heights. Nevertheless, the successive departures of core AI executives have cast a shadow of uncertainty over Kuaishou's AI strategy. Against the backdrop of intensifying competition in the short-video industry, rivals like Douyin and Channels are increasing their investments in the AI domain. For Kuaishou to maintain its competitiveness, a stable and top-tier technical team is indispensable. This also signifies that, at a time when AI has become a core competitive advantage in the industry, how to retain top technical talent and how to balance authority, responsibility, and innovative vitality during organizational adjustments have become new challenges that Kuaishou must address. After all, realizing the goal of "AI becoming the company's second growth curve" inevitably requires the support of technical talent.
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