Recently, Dr. Dong Yu, Deputy Director of Tencent AI Lab, has decided to leave the company for personal development reasons. This news has been confirmed by multiple independent sources. Since joining Tencent in 2017, Dr. Yu has been a key figure in the company's AI research field, serving as a Distinguished Scientist and Chief Scientist at Tencent Yitu Lab. Before leaving, he was responsible for research and development in speech processing, natural language processing, and digital human technologies, accumulating rich experience and achievements.
Dr. Yu has a deep background in deep learning and speech recognition. He worked at Microsoft for nearly 20 years and has published over 300 academic papers and obtained more than 100 patents. His departure undoubtedly caused a significant impact on Tencent's AI Lab.
Under Dr. Yu's leadership, the "Hunyuan" team continuously advanced the development of large models. The "Hunyuan" team spans multiple departments, including big data, AI Lab, and the machine learning platform, focusing on multimodal generation, understanding, and text research. Although Dr. Yu's departure is seen as the exit of a veteran, Tencent has not stopped moving forward but instead increased its efforts to introduce new talent. In the second half of 2025, Yao Shunyu, a renowned scientist from the OpenAI Institute, joined Tencent and quickly attracted core talents from companies such as ByteDance and Alibaba.
Notably, Tencent is undergoing a series of internal resource integrations aimed at improving the efficiency of large model development. Previously, Tencent's R&D resources were scattered across different business groups, leading to a lack of concentration in R&D efforts and resource waste. To address this issue, Tencent established new departments within the Technology Engineering Group (TEG), including the AI Infra Department, AI Data Department, and Data Computing Platform Department, to ensure more rational allocation and utilization of resources.
As market competition intensifies, the capability to develop foundational models has become the core competitiveness of AI companies. Liu Zhiping, President of Tencent Group, stated in the Q3 2025 earnings call that the market has not yet seen an absolute leader, and future adjustments will be crucial for Tencent, affecting its development trajectory in the AI field.
