From 2025 to 2026, Zhang Chi was an AI researcher at ByteDance Seed, the division behind Doubao, China's most-used chatbot. Now a assistant professor at Peking University, he joins Chang for a rare insider account of life at one of China's top AI labs. He talks about ByteDance's two-hour nap culture, the shortcuts Chinese labs take to catch up to the US, the ubiquity of Claude Code, and why he thinks the gap with American frontier labs is widening.
