Multiple sources have confirmed to 36Kr that Pan Xin, former CTO of Sharge and previously head of vision large model development at ByteDance, has joined Meituan.
Pan began his career as a researcher at Google DeepMind, where he helped develop the dynamic graph mode for TensorFlow. After returning to China, he held senior positions at Baidu, Tencent, and ByteDance.
At Baidu, Pan led optimization for the PaddlePaddle deep learning framework and built the company’s artificial intelligence infrastructure. He later headed AI-generated content and vision large model development at Tencent and ByteDance, focusing on multimodal AI systems. In November 2024, he joined Sharge, where he oversaw AI R&D and the company’s smart glasses project.
According to sources familiar with the matter, Pan now leads multimodal AI innovation at Meituan and oversees development of several related applications, including the company’s LongCat app.
In 2025, Meituan identified food delivery and AI as its two priorities. During the company’s first-quarter earnings call, CEO Wang Xing outlined Meituan’s proprietary large model, LongCat, for the first time. He said Meituan’s AI roadmap is structured across three layers:
- Applying AI across internal operations to improve productivity.
- Using AI to upgrade existing B2B and B2C products, and to create new AI-native services.
- Building self-developed foundation models and related capabilities.
However, since the second quarter, China’s on-demand delivery market has entered a new phase of intense competition. Under pressure, Meituan has prioritized the allocation of resources toward training and optimizing its foundational models.
Sources close to the company told 36Kr that despite these challenges, Meituan remains highly active in AI hiring, particularly in pretraining and applied AI roles.
So far in 2025, Meituan has announced several updates to its foundation models and applied systems, covering multiple modalities spanning language, vision, audio, and video. This effort, insiders said, is laying the groundwork for an AI-driven transformation of Meituan’s core businesses.
Since the second half of 2025, Meituan has accelerated the rollout of AI-enabled applications across its main verticals. In October, the company introduced two AI tools for restaurant merchants, offering free access to users across the industry.
At present, Meituan’s financial services, customer service, and e-commerce units are all recruiting aggressively for AI talent, particularly in post-training and commercialization positions.
Previously, Meituan’s AI experiments were centered on standalone consumer-facing apps such as Wow and Miaoshua, which operated independently from its core business units. These projects have since been scaled back.
A more recent indicator of Meituan’s consolidation in AI development is the restructuring of Light Year (Guangnian Zhiwai), a large model developer founded by Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen and later acquired by Meituan. The team now operates internally under the name GN06.
According to Leiphone, in November, former Light Year head Liu Jiong was reassigned to Meituan, reporting directly to platform head Li Shubin. Recruitment for the GN06 team has also slowed in recent months, signaling a more focused phase of AI integration within the company.
KrASIA Connection features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Deng Yongyi for 36Kr.