On July 24, according to media reports, Tencent announced on July 23 that it has merged the multimodal model department and the large language model department, establishing a new Basic Model Department, which will be managed by Tencent's Chief AI Scientist Yao Shunyu. The purpose of this restructuring is clear - to improve model development and collaboration efficiency, and to explore the intelligence limits of full-modal models.
This move had been foreshadowed. Last December, Yao Shunyu had already taken on the role of head of the large language model department. Now, bringing together the multimodal and language lines under one leader and one department means that Tencent is aligning the capabilities of "being able to see images" and "being able to converse" in its Yuanmeng technology roadmap. When the development barriers between multimodal and language models are broken down, the refinement of full-modal models truly has a unified command center.
