At 28, Yao Shunyu sits beside Ma Huateng as China's AI talent war heats up
An analysis piece notes that when Guangdong party secretary Huang Kunming visited Tencent's Shenzhen headquarters on Oct. 8, 28-year-old Yao Shunyu sat at Ma Huateng's right hand. A Tsinghua Yao Class graduate and Princeton PhD who joined OpenAI in 2024 to work on Operator and DeepResearch, Yao joined Tencent in December 2025 as chief AI scientist in the CEO/president's office and now runs its foundation model, AI infra and AI data units covering the full Hunyuan stack. The article also reports that DeepSeek raised more than 50 billion yuan in a first round, opened a second round of the same size and is preparing an IPO, after at least five core researchers left for Xiaomi, ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu and an autonomous-driving startup.
The piece argues that as model release cycles and researcher tenures both shrink, the talent race is really a contest over proven capability and time windows.