Shunyu Yao

Shunyu Yao is a prominent AI researcher who left OpenAI in 2025 to join Tencent as Chief AI Scientist within the CEO/President's Office, concurrently heading Tencent's newly established AI Infrastructure Department and Large Language Model Department. A Tsinghua "Yao Class" alumnus who served as president of the Yao Class Student Union and co-founded the Tsinghua Rap Club, he completed his PhD in Computer Science at Princeton University (2019-2024), where his research on language agents — including the influential ReAct and Tree of Thoughts papers — has been cited more than 15,000 times.

At OpenAI, which he joined in 2024 after graduating, Yao was a core contributor to the company's first-generation agent products, Operator and Deep Research. In April 2025 he published an influential essay titled "The Second Half," arguing that AI progress is shifting from inventing better training methods toward deploying AI to solve real-world problems. He was named to MIT Technology Review's China list of "35 Innovators Under 35" in May 2025, becoming its youngest honoree.

At Tencent, Yao has stated his goal is to help China establish a "long-term AGI organization," structuring the effort around foundation model research, product development, and frontier exploration — arguing frontier exploration remains the most underinvested of the three in China.