Ma Huateng sits beside Tencent chief AI scientist Yao Shunyu at Shenzhen briefing
Chinese media report that on October 8 Guangdong party secretary Huang Kunming visited Tencent's Shenzhen headquarters to review its AI research and industrial plans, and that chairman and CEO Ma Huateng sat next to Tencent chief AI scientist Yao Shunyu at the following discussion. The reports say Yao, born in 1998, studied in Tsinghua University's Yao class and earned a computer science PhD at Princeton before joining OpenAI as a research scientist in 2024, where he worked on the operator agent product and deep research and is linked to the ReAct method. He left OpenAI for Tencent in September 2025 and in December was named chief AI scientist in the CEO/president's office, reporting to president Liu Chiping while also heading the AI Infra and large language model departments. TMTPost says Tencent merged its Hunyuan multimodal and LLM departments into a foundation model department under Yao in July, and cites the half-year report for capital expenditure up 81.9% year on year to 84.72 billion yuan.
The pairing is widely read as a public signal that Tencent is putting AI at the center of its strategy and promoting younger technical leaders.