Former OpenAI Researcher Yao Shunyu Named Chief AI Scientist at Tencent, Cites Goal of Long-Term AGI Effort in China

Yao Shunyu, who joined Tencent in the last year after leaving OpenAI, said Friday that his personal goal is to establish a long-term AGI organization in China. Yao spoke on-stage at a Tencent event in Beijing with company cloud executive Dowson Tong. A senior Beijing official gave opening remarks at the event co-organized with local authorities.

Yao said his vision for AGI will require foundational knowledge, products and frontier exploration. He added that he does not think ChatGPT or Claude will be the only super-app and that untapped potential lies in the trillions of dollars. Performance of an AI tool is most important followed by cost, Yao said.

He stated that the path forward in China is with smaller AI models and more consistent performance on basic tasks. Baidu CEO Robin Li previously predicted it would take until at least 2034 to achieve AGI. Elon Musk forecast AGI in 2026.

Anthropic warned on Thursday that frontier models are nearing the point where they can improve themselves without human oversight. S. lead over Chinese models.

Wu Yonghui left Google DeepMind to head research at ByteDance Seed from California in February 2025. Startup Moonshot was founded by former Meta AI and Google Brain employee Yang Zhilin. Alibaba reportedly hired Google DeepMind researcher Hao Zhou to support Qwen AI development.

Zhou and Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment. S. immigration policies has also encouraged Chinese nationals to find work in their home country, even if the pay may be lower.

China is also ramping up investment to attract talent and spend more on basic research as the country pursues scientific breakthroughs over the next five years.