Tencent Establishes Foundation Model Department, Consolidating AI R&D Under Shunyu Yao
量子位 · wechat · 2026-08-08
Tencent announced the establishment of a Foundation Model Department, deeply restructuring its Hunyuan AI business. The core of this adjustment is to centralize the command of AI R&D to shorten the link from model to product.
Key changes include:
- Expansion of Shunyu Yao's Role: As Chief AI Scientist, he has progressively taken over the leadership of foundation models, AI Infra, multimodal, and Agent collaboration, unifying the R&D loop.
- Integration of the Hunyuan System: AI Lab staff merged into Hunyuan, and the LLM and Multimodal departments combined. This aims to align model structure, training strategies, and product feedback within a unified organizational container.
- Product-Side Results: Following the release of the new Hy3 model, daily token consumption surged 20x, and total API calls grew 68x compared to the previous generation. This indicates a strategic shift from focusing on leaderboards to real-world application usage.
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