“Former OpenAI researcher Tian Yonglong has been appointed as the multi-modal leader of Tencent Hunyuan, reporting directly to Yao Shunyu”

On September 9, 2026, Tencent announced that Tian Yonglong, a former researcher at OpenAI, had joined Tencent’s CEO/President’s office as the head of Hunyuan Multimodal, reporting directly to Yao Shunyu, the head of large models. Tian Yonglong previously announced his joining Tencent’s Large Language Model Department on July 8, participating in the development of visual language models. He had worked on computer vision and generative model research at Google and OpenAI, and had collaborated with Yao Shunyu during his time at OpenAI. Background information shows that Tencent established organizations such as AIInfra last December and appointed Yao Shunyu as Chief AI Scientist. According to public data, last week China accounted for the highest proportion of global large model calls, with Tencent’s Hunyuan Hy4 preview ranking first globally, with a 379% increase in weekly calls compared to the previous week. On July 24 this year, Tencent announced the merger of the Hunyuan Multimodal Model Department and the Large Language Model Department to form the Basic Model Department, managed by Yao Shunyu, to improve research collaboration efficiency and explore the intelligent limits of full-modal models. Tian Yonglong was responsible for this structural adjustment…