On October 8, at Tencent's headquarters, a young man born in 1998 sat beside Tencent Holdings Ltd (00700) Chairman and CEO Pony Ma.

According to footage from Guangdong TV's "Guangdong News" that day, the young man seated next to Pony Ma was Yao Shunyu, Tencent's Chief AI Scientist. Coincidentally, in 1998, 27-year-old Pony Ma founded Tencent; in December 2025, also at 27, Yao Shunyu joined Tencent as Chief AI Scientist in the CEO/President's Office, becoming the "number one" in Tencent's AI business.

Public records show that Yao Shunyu was born in 1998 in Hefei, Anhui Province, graduated from Tsinghua University's Yao Class, went to Princeton University for his doctorate in 2019, and joined OpenAI after earning his PhD in 2024.

The expansion of Yao Shunyu's authority at Tencent can be seen from the organizational adjustments over the past year. In December 2025, Tencent announced an upgrade of its large model R&D structure, establishing the AI Infra (AI infrastructure) Department, AI Data Department, and Data Computing Platform Department. Yao Shunyu was appointed Chief AI Scientist in the "CEO/President's Office," reporting to Tencent President Martin Lau; he also concurrently serves as head of the AI Infra Department and the Large Language Model Department, reporting to Lu Shan, President of the Technology and Engineering Group.

According to public reports, the AI Infra Department concerns how models are trained, how they reason, and how efficiency is improved, while the Large Language Model Department concerns the capability ceiling and iteration direction of the Hunyuan model. Both the model and the computing foundation were simultaneously placed in one person's hands.

In July this year, Tencent announced the merger of the Hunyuan multimodal model department and the large language model department to form the Foundation Model Department, managed uniformly by Yao Shunyu, to further improve model R&D and collaboration efficiency and explore the intelligence ceiling of omni-modal models.

A young researcher returning from Silicon Valley took over multiple business lines within one year of joining and reports directly to the company's top management—such a level of authorization is rare among China's major internet companies.