Tencent Hunyuan's post-95s RL lead Pang Tianyu reportedly resigns, less than 9 months after joining

Beating AI News Flash: According to a message from Shen Ma's social circle, Pang Tianyu, Chief Research Scientist at Tencent Hunyuan and head of multimodal reinforcement learning technology, has left the company and is very likely to start a business next. Pang Tianyu announced joining Tencent in January this year and officially came on board on February 4, less than 9 months ago.

Pang Tianyu holds a PhD from the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University, where he studied under Professor Zhu Jun, and previously served as a senior research scientist at Singapore's Sea AI Lab. At Hunyuan, he was mainly responsible for multimodal reinforcement learning research, covering areas such as image generation and vision-language models. In June this year, Tencent open-sourced the multimodal reinforcement learning framework UniRL, with Pang Tianyu listed as a credited author of the project; the framework was just updated to v0.2.0 in October.

In July this year, Tencent merged the Hunyuan large language model department and the multimodal model department to establish the Foundation Model Department, with Yao Shunyu overseeing it uniformly. In the same month, Hu Han, head of Hunyuan multimodal understanding, left to start a business. In September, former OpenAI researcher Tian Yonglong was appointed head of Hunyuan multimodal.