Yao Shunyu Joins Tencent as Chief AI Scientist, Integrates AI Units; Hunyuan Hy3 Launches with 68x Call Growth

Yao Shunyu joined Tencent in December 2025 as Chief AI Scientist, reporting directly to President Liu Chiping, while also serving as head of the AI Infra Department and the Large Language Model Department. He drove the integration of Tencent's AI capabilities, unifying AI functions that had been scattered across business lines including WeChat, advertising, gaming, and cloud computing. In December 2025, he rebuilt the infrastructure for pre-training and reinforcement learning. In March 2026, the nearly decade-old Tencent AI Lab was dissolved, with some of its research personnel transferred to the Large Language Model Department under Yao's supervision. On July 23, 2026, the Hunyuan Large Language Model Department and the Multimodal Model Department were formally merged to form the Foundation Model Department, managed by Yao Shunyu. Linus, the former head of the Multimodal Model team, now reports directly to Yao. With this, Tencent Hunyuan's capabilities in text, image, video, speech, 3D generation, reinforcement learning, and agent functions were consolidated into a single foundation model system.

On July 6, 2026, Tencent officially released Hunyuan Hy3. Within a week of launch, total calls for Hy3 grew more than 68 times compared to the previous generation Hy2, and it ranked first on OpenRouter's global model call volume leaderboard. After WorkBuddy allowed users to freely choose models, 60% of users selected Hy3. After joining Tencent, Yao had pointed out internally that Hunyuan's evaluation process was flawed, with teams overly chasing leaderboard scores and even incorporating related test data into the training set, causing the model to be unstable in real-world scenarios. He instructed the teams to stop focusing on leaderboards and instead re-examine underlying processes such as data, pre-training, and infrastructure.

On July 20, 2026, Tencent issued an internal organizational adjustment notice, transferring the relevant business and some teams of the QClaw product center to Cloud Product Department Six, the department to which WorkBuddy belongs. QClaw will continue to operate, but the two AI office products with similar functions have moved from independent development to a unified management system. In June 2026, WorkBuddy's monthly visits in the domestic PC native AI office agent market exceeded 20 million, surpassing the combined total of the second and third place competitors.