Yao Shunyu's 88 Days
Yao Shunyu, a 27-year-old AI expert with a background from Princeton and OpenAI, joined Tencent in September 2025. Within 88 days, he led a major overhaul of Tencent’s AI strategy and organization, resulting in the release of Hunyuan Hy3 preview—a MoE model with 295B total parameters and 21B active parameters, supporting up to 256K context length.
The launch came after Tencent leadership, including CEO Ma Huateng and President Martin Lau, openly criticized Hunyuan's earlier underperformance—citing slow development, over-reliance on superficial benchmark optimization, and poor generalization in real-world applications. Internal adoption was low, with key business units like WeChat and gaming seeking external AI solutions.
Yao reshaped Tencent’s AI approach by integrating previously siloed teams, dissolving the ten-year-old Tencent AI Lab, and establishing new units focused on AI infrastructure and data. Hy3 preview was developed using co-design principles, closely aligned with product teams to ensure practical usability from the start. It has already been integrated into core products like Yuanbao, QQ, and enterprise tools.
The release signals a shift from chasing rankings to building usable, scalable AI grounded in Tencent’s ecosystem. While external partnerships (like with DeepSeek and OpenClaw) helped retain users temporarily, the focus is now on making Hunyuan a reliable internal foundation. The real test lies in sustaining this new organizational momentum amid fierce competition from Alibaba, DeepSeek, and others.
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