Yao Shunyu (姚顺雨)

Chief AI Scientist & Head of AI Infrastructure (since Dec 2025); reports to President Martin Lau — Tencent

Website Google ScholarOpenReview

Born 1997. Youngest chief scientist at a major Chinese Big Tech company. Created ReAct (2022, foundational framework for reasoning-and-action in LLM agents), Tree of Thoughts (2023, multi-path deliberate problem solving), and co-created SWE-bench (ICLR 2024 Oral). At OpenAI, was a core contributor to Operator (Computer-Using Agent) and Deep Research.

Joined Tencent December 2025. Led a full rebuild of pretraining and RL stacks starting February 2026, producing Hy3-Preview (295B/21B MoE) in under 3 months from cold start. Ranked 3rd in science in Anhui Province for the 2015 college entrance exam. Yao Class at Tsinghua (elite CS program founded by Turing Award winner Andrew Yao). PhD from Princeton. ~25,000 citations. MIT TR "35 Under 35" China (2024).

Affiliations

  • ●
    Tencent — Chief AI Scientist & Head of AI Infrastructure (since Dec 2025); reports to President Martin Lau
    Formerly: OpenAI (Research Scientist, 2024; core contributor to Operator & Deep Research); PhD Princeton (2019-2024, advisor Karthik Narasimhan); Yao Class, Tsinghua (2015-2019)

Related Outputs

2026-04-23 Hy3 Preview model