Tencent restructures AI operations, promotes high-profile recruit to chief AI scientist

Tencent Holdings has initiated a major restructuring at its artificial intelligence group with the promotion of recent high-profile recruit Vinces Yao Shunyu, a former researcher at OpenAI.\nWithout mentioning his Chinese name, Shenzhen-based Tencent’s announcement on Wednesday came with a photo of Yao. He was tasked to lead the company’s new AI infrastructure efforts, including the development of large language models (LLMs).\nYao’s official position is chief AI scientist under the CEO’s office at Tencent, reporting directly to president Martin Lau Chi-ping.\nAs part of Tencent’s AI reorganisation, the Technology Engineering Group (TEG), one of the company’s six major business units, established two new departments.\nThe “AI Infra” department was “responsible for developing the technical capabilities of large-model training and inference platforms”, while the “Data Computing Platform” team was tasked to “establish comprehensive full-stack service capabilities for constructing large-scale integrated big data and machine learning”, according to the internal announcement confirmed by three sources.\nYao was also named the head of TEG’s LLM development and the AI Infra department, reporting to the group’s president Lu Shan.\nThe company renamed its existing data platform team as “AI Data”, which was assigned to provide “high-quality data services for large-scale model pre-training, post-training and model applications”.\nMeanwhile, the Machine Learning Platform department was dissolved, with its members reassigned to the new AI Infra and Data Computing Platform departments.\n\nA Tencent representative said the company does not comment on internal announcements.\nTencent’s latest restructuring underscored the intense competition in the country’s fast-developing AI sector, where internet peer Alibaba Group Holding continued to tinker with the operations of Alibaba Cloud, the firm’s AI and cloud computing unit. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.\nAlibaba Cloud last week said that it was setting up a new division to push the consumer use of AI applications based on its Qwen family of models. The new business unit, Qwen Consumer Business Group, is led by Alibaba vice-president Wu Jia.\nMeanwhile, Yao had been helping Tencent recruit fresh AI talent on the mainland from the likes of ByteDance and Alibaba, according to a report by 36Kr, which broke the news of Tencent’s AI restructuring on Wednesday.\nA graduate of Princeton University and Tsinghua University, Yao was a core contributor to OpenAI’s first AI agents, Operator and Deep Research, according to 36Kr.\nAt the company’s latest quarterly earnings call last month, Tencent’s Lau said the firm was hiring more top-notch AI researchers to help improve its Hunyuan model family.\nThis year, Tencent has open-sourced more than 30 new AI models, including several industry-leading 3D-generating models, as well as systems that simulate the physical world.\nAdditional reporting by Iris Deng\n