IT Home October 12 news — According to a report by China News Service's "Sanlihe" public account, on October 8, the first working day after the National Day holiday, Guangdong Provincial Party Secretary Huang Kunming went to Shenzhen for research and visited Tencent's headquarters. During the discussion session, Tencent Board Chairman and CEO Ma Huateng spoke,and sitting next to him was a young man of only 28 years old — Tencent Chief AI Scientist Yao Shunyu。
The report said that with the provincial party secretary visiting Tencent headquarters, Ma Huateng sat side by side with the group's "No. 1 AI position",which reflects Guangdong's and Tencent's determination to bet on artificial intelligence。
In 2025, Guangdong's provincial AI core industry scale exceeded 300 billion yuan,roughly a quarter of the national total. On October 9, Guangdong held a province-wide advanced manufacturing conference, which mentioned "vigorously promoting AI to empower advanced manufacturing development in an all-round, deep, and high-level way".
Combining previous IT Home reports, Yao Shunyu graduated from Tsinghua University's Yao Class with his bachelor's degree and received a PhD in computer science from Princeton University. In 2024 he joined OpenAI and participated in developing the agent products operator and deep research. His research focuses on language agents interacting with the real world; he proposed the ReAct method, pioneering the "reasoning — action" combined agent paradigm, which has been widely adopted by academia and industry.
In December 2025, Tencent upgraded its large model R&D architecture, newly establishing the AI Infra Department, the AI Data Department, and the Data Computing Platform Department, comprehensively strengthening its large model R&D system and core capabilities.Yao Shunyu (Vinces Yao) took the post of Chief AI Scientist of the "CEO / President's Office", reporting to Tencent President Lau Chi Ping (Martin Lau); he also concurrently serves as head of the AI Infra Department and the Large Language Model Department, reporting to Technology and Engineering Group President Lu Shan.
At Tencent's shareholders meeting in May this year, Ma Huateng said that Tencent's foundational AI capabilities were not outstanding in its early years, but in recent years it has continuously filled in its shortcomings through talent building, team management, and internal training,and it is now gradually getting onto the development track。
Ma Huateng frankly admitted that Tencent may not be the fastest in the industry to seize opportunities, but it insists on taking the right path and steadily advancing by combining its own unique strengths: "You can't just casually step across when you see others doing something over there, grabbing other people's territory — we did that in the past but basically failed later."
As to whether Tencent's AI has fallen behind, Ma Huateng said, "A year ago we thought we had boarded the ship, then we found that ship was leaking; now it feels like we've stepped aboard but can't sit down yet, and we still hope the ship can go faster."
At the 2026 Tencent Cloud AI Industry Application Conference in June this year, in response to external criticism that "Tencent is slow",Tencent Group Senior Executive Vice President and Cloud and Smart Industries Group CEO Dowson Tang responded, admitting that in a complex organization different business lines move at different speeds, some fast and some slow, with failures and explorations as well, and that he is open to external criticism and reminders and accepts suggestions.
According to a Sina Tech report in July this year, Tencent announced the merger of its Hunyuan multimodal model department and its large language model department to form a Foundation Models Department,uniformly managed by Tencent Chief AI Scientist Yao Shunyu, in order to further improve model R&D and collaboration efficiency and explore the intelligence ceiling of omni-modal models.
According to a Caixin report on October 11After Meta released its personal agent Muse, it quickly prompted domestic tech giants to follow suit. In the final days of the 9th month, Tencent launched a personal agent product called LightVela, which it calls a "cloud-based personal assistant." It can be accessed via WeChat and is online around the clock to help users handle various daily requests. However, the product is still in the developer experience stage.