YAO Shunyu (Stanford physics) (姚顺宇)
Senior Research Scientist, Google DeepMind core Gemini team (since September 29, 2025)
I have no mentor nor old friends in this industry, so of course I’ll call out whoever I want.
The era of AI individual heroism is over, so there are no heroes either; sometimes I even think the old-era heroes were a bit foolish.
This AI thing, it doesn't really require brains to begin with.
Now everyone is a surfer, but in essence it's a wave, not you the surfer.
Yao Shunyu (姚顺宇, born ~1997) is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, joining on September 29, 2025. He is a theoretical physicist turned AI researcher.
He entered Tsinghua University's Physics Department in 2015, where he won the university's highest undergraduate honor (Special Prize Scholarship) and published groundbreaking work on the Non-Hermitian Skin Effect in Physical Review Letters. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics under Douglas Stanford and Stephen Shenker, then did a postdoc at UC Berkeley before pivoting to AI.
He joined Anthropic on October 1, 2024, where he contributed to Claude 3.7 and Claude 4.5 development through reinforcement learning research. He left Anthropic on September 19, 2025, and joined Google DeepMind's Gemini team.
He is one of two prominent AI researchers named Yao Shunyu from Tsinghua's class of 2015/2019 - the other (姚顺雨) is now at Tencent.
