YAO Shunyu (姚顺雨)
Chief AI Scientist, Tencent (December 2025)
All major choices in life, whether buying a house, choosing a job, or doing anything, are like a text game. From a philosophical perspective, life is an infinite-flow game. Every day you have many choices, which to some extent are very high-level and open-ended.
OpenAI's advantage lies in having the world's best models and underlying infrastructure, some established directions, and many strong researchers, all of which can help me explore the next fundamental breakthrough.
Language is a tool invented by humans to achieve generalization, and this is more fundamental than other things.
I have always had this non-consensus: I want to do Agent.
YAO Shunyu (姚顺雨, born 1998, also known as Vinces Yao) is the Chief AI Scientist at Tencent, appointed in December 2025. He is a prodigious AI researcher who completed his undergraduate studies at Tsinghua University's prestigious Yao Class (姚班) and earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2024, specializing in natural language processing and reinforcement learning.
At Princeton, he proposed the Tree of Thoughts (ToT) framework and the ReAct method, which became foundational paradigms for AI agent development. He joined OpenAI in August 2024, where he was a core contributor to Operator and Deep Research.
In May 2025, he was named to MIT Technology Review's '35 Innovators Under 35' China list. At Tencent, he serves as Chief AI Scientist in the CEO/President Office, reporting directly to President Martin Lau, while also heading the AI Infra Department and Large Language Model Department.
In April 2026, he delivered Tencent's first major model release under his leadership: Hy3 preview (295B parameters), which was open-sourced.