Ten-Year AI Lab Comes to a Close: Tencent Research Strength Gathers for Convergence on Mega Model

According to 1M AI News, Tencent's TEG (Technology Engineering Group) has undergone an organizational restructuring, officially dissolving the AI Lab established in 2016. Tencent Vice President Jiang Jie no longer serves as the director of AI Lab, with other management responsibilities unchanged. Some former AI Lab members have been reassigned to the Hyphen team reporting to Chief AI Scientist Yao Shunyu; the Industry-Academia-Research Cooperation Center remains intact; and the head of the multimodal team now reports to TEG President Lu Shan.

Yao Shunyu, born in 1997, a graduate of Tsinghua University, previously served as a researcher at OpenAI. In December 2025, he joined Tencent and reported directly to CEO Liu Chiping. During Tencent's March 18 financial report meeting, it was disclosed that Yao Shunyu's leadership of Hyphen 3.0 has entered internal business testing and is expected to be released in April.

Over the past decade, AI Lab has been led by individuals such as Yao Xing, Zhang Tong, Zhang Zhengyou, and Jiang Jie, achieving significant results in Decision Intelligence ("Absolute Enlightenment"), Medical Imaging ("Tencent Miying"), and Protein Structure Prediction (tFold). The technology has been applied to over a hundred Tencent products, including WeChat and QQ.