Tencent appoints 28-year-old chief AI scientist as Guangdong AI industry tops 300 billion yuan

Guangdong's core AI industry surpassed 300 billion yuan in 2025, about a quarter of China's total. The provincial party chief recently visited Tencent's headquarters in Shenzhen, where CEO Ma Huateng sat next to 28-year-old chief AI scientist Yao Shunyu, showing Guangdong and Tencent's big bet on AI.

Yao graduated from Tsinghua University's Yao Class and earned a computer science PhD from Princeton. He joined OpenAI, worked on operator and deep research, and created the ReAct method, a pioneering "reasoning plus acting" agent paradigm. Tencent has merged its model teams into a foundation model department led by him.

Ma Huateng admitted Tencent's early AI skills were not strong, but the company keeps catching up. "We may not be the fastest to grab opportunities, but we stay on the right path." Tencent has also launched LightVela, a personal agent that works through WeChat and is now in developer testing.