Tencent HY Poaches OpenAI Researcher Tian Yonglong to Lead Multimodal AI

Tencent HY is reportedly hiring Tian Yonglong, a research scientist from OpenAI, to lead its multimodal model team, reporting to chief AI scientist Yao Shunyu. This would mark the second major OpenAI researcher to join Tencent within a year, following Yao's move in September 2025. Tian's academic background includes a bachelor's from Tsinghua University, a master's from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a PhD from MIT. His work at OpenAI focused on machine perception and generative models, making his collaboration with Yao at Tencent a natural fit.