KUAISHOU AI key figure will leave

Author | Wang Xiaojuan

Editor | Zhou Zhiyu

Kuaishou has once again seen changes in its core executive team.

On December 30th, it was reported that Kuaishou Technology's Vice President and head of the foundational large model and recommendation model, Zhou Guorui, is about to leave the company. It is understood that Zhou Guorui's internal system status has been updated to "on leave," and his personal signature has been changed to "Log Out." As of the time of publication, Kuaishou has not responded to this event.

During Kuaishou's Q1 2025 earnings call, the company's founder and CEO Cheng Yixiao explicitly identified AI as the company's "second growth curve."

Currently, Zhou Guorui's departure has triggered market sensitivity regarding the continuity of Kuaishou's AI strategy.

Zhou Guorui's four-year tenure at Kuaishou coincided with a critical phase in the company's AI strategy, from its inception to full-scale implementation. As a master's graduate from the Pattern Recognition Laboratory at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, he previously served as a senior algorithm expert in Alibaba's Alimama division, focusing on the application of deep learning in advertising ranking.

After joining Kuaishou in 2021, Zhou Guorui quickly became a key figure in the company's AI technological innovations, particularly in optimizing recommendation systems.

His most notable contribution was leading the development of the generative end-to-end recommendation architecture OneRec. This system disrupted the traditional recommendation system's multi-stage "cascade" architecture by achieving breakthroughs in "larger models at lower costs" through unified modeling and link compression.

According to public information, this system reduced service costs to one-tenth of the original system and has been fully implemented in multiple core business scenarios, including short videos, local life, and e-commerce.

According to Kuaishou's Q3 2025 earnings report, OneRec significantly improved advertising matching efficiency by exploring the "deep connections between user behavior and marketing conversion," driving a 14% year-on-year growth in domestic online marketing service revenue.

However, Kuaishou's AI strategy currently faces frequent changes in core personnel. Zhou Guorui's departure is not an isolated incident but rather a continuation of a "brain drain" of technical executives that has persisted for over six months.

According to incomplete statistics, since 2025, several vice president-level technical executives have left Kuaishou, covering multiple core areas such as recommendation algorithms, multimodal, and commercialization.

In August, Kuaishou's Vice President and head of large models, Zhang Di, confirmed his departure, with his responsibilities taken over by Senior Vice President Gai Kun. In addition, this wave of departures includes Vice President of Magnetic Engine Yuan Shuai, head of multimodal Wang Zhongyuan, Chief Audio and Video Architect Liu Qi, head of technology knowledge graph and large model Agent technology Fu Ruiji, and former Kuaishou Vice President and head of recommendation algorithms Song Yang, among others.

While AI technical executives are frequently leaving, Kuaishou's platform technology defenses are also facing severe tests.

On the evening of December 22nd, Kuaishou experienced a serious automated attack from "black and gray industries." A large number of violating live broadcast rooms emerged in a short period, breaching the platform's security defenses, which ultimately forced the company to implement a temporary "circuit breaker" measure by taking down the live broadcast function entirely.

This security incident, which lasted over 90 minutes, exposed the platform's shortcomings in real-time monitoring and emergency response mechanisms when dealing with new AI-driven automated attacks This security incident, combined with the wave of executive departures, has amplified market concerns. Internally, the ongoing talent drain may erode the foundation of long-term technological innovation and strategic coherence; externally, the robust operation of a large ecosystem is facing increasingly complex new threats.

Reports suggest that Zhou Guorui may join Meta or TikTok after his departure, reflecting the fierce competition among global tech companies for top AI talent. Recently, companies like ByteDance have announced a new round of salary increases, further escalating the competition for AI talent in the industry.

However, the consecutive departures of core executives in the AI sector have cast a shadow of uncertainty over KUAISHOU's AI strategy.

In the context of intensifying competition in the short video industry, competitors like Douyin and WeChat Channels are ramping up their investments in AI. For KUAISHOU to maintain its competitiveness, it relies on a stable and top-notch technical team.

This also means that, as AI becomes the core competitive advantage of the industry, how to retain top technical talent and how to balance responsibilities and innovative vitality during structural adjustments have become new challenges that KUAISHOU must address. After all, to make "AI the company's second growth curve," the support of technical talent is essential