Tencent Holdings Limited has recently hired a leading artificial intelligence researcher from OpenAI, marking one of the most notable moves of talent from the US AI sector to China, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The Shenzhen-based gaming and messaging giant recruited Yao Shunyu to help integrate AI technologies into its products and services. Sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the move has not yet been publicly announced, confirmed the hiring. Yao previously worked at OpenAI in the United States and has held positions at Google and Princeton University, as noted on his LinkedIn profile.
Competition for AI talent has been intense this year, with companies like Meta reportedly offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million to attract top employees. Tencent reportedly offered Yao a package worth up to 100 million yuan, though details about the structure of this compensation were not disclosed. After local media coverage suggested that Yao would join Tencent with a pay package exceeding 100 million yuan, the company posted on its WeChat account a screenshot of one such article with the word “rumor” stamped across it, without clarifying which parts of the report were inaccurate.
Requests for comment from Tencent, OpenAI, and Yao Shunyu were not immediately answered.
Yao has contributed to or co-authored around ten research papers, focusing on AI agents, according to his GitHub page. His work includes publications such as “Language Agents: From Next-Token Prediction to Digital Automation” and “Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents.” Yao completed his undergraduate studies at Tsinghua University, China’s top science and engineering school, and earned a PhD in computer science from Princeton University, according to his LinkedIn profile.