Yao Shunyu Joins Tencent as Chief AI Scientist; Hunyuan Hy3 Calls Surge 68-Fold

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 organization, unifying AI capabilities previously scattered across WeChat, advertising, gaming, cloud computing and other business lines. In December 2025, he rebuilt the infrastructure for pre-training and reinforcement learning. In March 2026, Tencent AI Lab, which had operated for nearly a decade, was dissolved, with some researchers transferred to the Large Language Model Department under Yao's leadership. On July 23, 2026, the Hunyuan Large Language Model Department and the Multimodal Model Department were formally merged to establish the Foundation Model Department, managed by Yao. Linus, the former head of the multimodal model team, now reports directly to Yao. With this, Hunyuan's text, image, video, speech, 3D generation, reinforcement learning and Agent capabilities were consolidated into a single foundation model system.

On July 6, 2026, Tencent officially released Hunyuan Hy3. One week after launch, total call volume for Hy3 grew more than 68-fold compared with the previous generation Hy2, and it topped the global model call volume ranking on OpenRouter. After WorkBuddy opened up model selection, 60% of users chose Hy3. After joining Tencent, Yao had pointed out internally that Hunyuan's evaluation process was flawed: teams were over-chasing leaderboard results, even adding related corpus to training sets, making the model unstable in real-world scenarios. He required teams to stop focusing on leaderboards and instead re-examine underlying areas such as data, pre-training and infrastructure.

On July 20, 2026, Tencent issued an internal reorganization notice, transferring QClaw product center's related business and some teams into Cloud Product Department Six, the department that houses WorkBuddy. 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 China's domestic PC native AI office agent market exceeded 20 million, surpassing the combined total of the second and third ranked players.