IT Home News on October 12th: According to a report by the China News Network's "Sanlihe" official account, on October 8th, the first working day after the National Day holiday, Huang Kunming, Secretary of the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee, visited Shenzhen for research and toured Tencent's headquarters. During the discussion session, Ma Huateng, Chairman of Tencent's Board of Directors and CEO, spoke, and sitting next to him was a young man who is only 28 years old. This person is Yao Shunyu, Tencent's Chief AI Scientist.
Reports say that the secretary of the provincial party committee visited Tencent's headquarters, where Ma Huateng sat side by side with the group's "AI No. 1 position." Behind this is the determination of Guangdong and Tencent to bet on artificial intelligence.
By 2025, the scale of Guangdong's core artificial intelligence industry is expected to exceed 300 billion yuan, accounting for about one-quarter of the national total. On October 9th, Guangdong held a provincial conference on advanced manufacturing, during which it was mentioned that "great efforts will be made to promote the all-round, in-depth, and high-level empowerment of advanced manufacturing through artificial intelligence."
As previously reported by IT, Yao Shunyu graduated from Tsinghua University's Yao Class with a bachelor's degree and obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University. In 2024, he joined OpenAI and participated in the development of intelligent agent products operator, deep, and research. His research focuses on the interaction between language agents and the real world, and he proposed the ReAct method, which pioneered an "inference-action" combined intelligent agent paradigm that has been widely adopted by both academia and industry.
In December 2025, Tencent upgraded its large model research and development architecture, newly establishing the AI Infra Department, the AI Data Department, and the Data Computing Platform Department to comprehensively strengthen its large model research and development system and core capabilities. Yao Shunyu ( Vinces Yao ) was appointed as the Chief AI Scientist of the " CEO / President's Office", reporting to Tencent President Liu Chiping; he also concurrently serves as the head of the AI Infra Department and the Large Language Models Department, reporting to Lu Shan, President of the Technology Engineering Group.
At Tencent's annual general meeting of shareholders in May this year, Pony Ma stated that in the early days, Tencent's foundational capabilities in the field of AI were not outstanding. In recent years, through talent development, team management, and internal training, Tencent has continuously made up for its weaknesses, and now it is gradually getting on track for development.
Ma Huateng frankly stated that Tencent may not always be the fastest in seizing opportunities in the industry, but by adhering to the right path and combining its unique advantages, the company has taken a steady and solid approach. "We can't just cross over and claim someone else's territory just because they are doing so; we have tried that in the past, but it basically ended in failure."
Regarding the question of whether Tencent AI is lagging behind, Ma Huateng said, "A year ago, we thought we had boarded the ship, but later we found that the ship was leaking. Now that we seem to be on it, we still can't sit down comfortably. 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 criticisms that Tencent was slowing down, Tang Daosheng, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent Group and Head of the Cloud and Smart Industries Group CEO, responded by acknowledging that different business units within a complex organization may vary in speed, with some progressing faster than others, while there are also failures and periods of exploration. He expressed an open attitude towards external criticism and reminders and accepted suggestions.
According to a report by Sina Technology in July this year, Tencent announced the merger of its Hybrid Meta-Modal Model department and its Large Language Model department to form a Basic Models department, which will be uniformly managed by Yao Shunyu, Tencent's Chief AI Scientist, with the aim of further enhancing model development and collaboration efficiency and exploring the intelligent potential of multi-modal models.
According to a report by Caixin on October 11, after Meta released its personal intelligent agent Muse, it prompted domestic technology giants to quickly follow suit. Tencent launched a personal intelligent agent product LightVela at the end of September, calling it a "cloud personal assistant" that can be accessed through WeChat and is available 24/7 to help users with various daily tasks. However, this product is still in the developer experience phase.
