Tencent has recruited several key members from ByteDance's Seed project, who will report to YAO Shunyu | Exclusive from Intelligence Emergence
Text by | Zhou Xinyu
Edited by | Su Jianxun
Since Yao Shunyu joined Tencent in September 2025, it has been regarded as a continuous signal of Tencent's heavy investment in basic models. In fact, throughout 2025, Tencent has been frantically recruiting talents in the field of large - model infrastructure from the industry. Among them, the figures of several "ByteDance - affiliated" technical backbones have emerged.
According to an insider close to Tencent's Hunyuan team, Xiao Xuefeng, the former head of ByteDance's Seed Visual AI platform team, and Zhang Chi from the Infra team recently joined Tencent quietly. They are responsible for work related to large - model Infra and report to Yao Shunyu, Tencent's chief AI scientist.
At the end of 2025, Tencent upgraded its large - model R & D architecture and newly established the AI Infra Department, with Yao Shunyu as the department head. It is understood that after joining, Xiao Xuefeng directly serves as the assistant head of this department, assisting Yao Shunyu in managing the department.
Meanwhile, Huang Qi, the head of the training Infra group in this department, also comes from ByteDance's Seed team.
Xiao Xuefeng.
In addition, there are also core developers from ByteDance in Tencent's Large Language Model Department, which is on the same level as the AI Infra Department. For example, Nick, the newly - joined head of the RL Infra group, is actually Zhang Chi from the former ByteDance Seed team.
Zhang Chi graduated from Southeast University and the University of Southern California. He left Seed at the end of 2025 and joined Tencent. This group has integrated the RL Infra team of the original machine - learning platform, with the goal of catching up with the RL framework efficiency of leading companies such as ByteDance. Currently, Zhang Chi also reports directly to Yao Shunyu. The head of the RL algorithm group in the Large Language Model Department, Yuan Yufeng, was also poached from ByteDance's Seed.
As of the time of publication, Tencent has not responded to the above information.
Since 2025, with the joining of top AI talents such as Yao Shunyu and Bo Liefeng (former head of Alibaba Tongyi's vision), Tencent has also increased its efforts in recruiting AI talents. According to "Intelligent Emergence", in the second half of 2025, Hunyuan quickly attracted several core employees from companies such as ByteDance, Alibaba, and Dark Side of the Moon.
The AI Infra capabilities of ByteDance's Seed team are recognized as leading in China. Its open - source veRL framework is the most mainstream reinforcement - learning training framework. Tencent's core purpose of poaching Infra talents from Seed is to strengthen its own AI Infra capabilities.
Tencent's intention of introducing AI Infra talents from the Seed team is very clear: to make up for the core underlying capabilities such as the training platform, inference system, and reinforcement - learning framework, improve the R & D efficiency of the Hunyuan large model, and enhance the model's ability to support the product side.
On March 18th, Tencent executives clearly mentioned in the earnings report communication meeting that since the second half of 2025, the Hunyuan team has fully launched the reorganization of the organizational structure and R & D process. In addition to focusing on improving data quality, it has also "rebuilt the infrastructure for pre - training and reinforcement learning".
From 2025 to now, Tencent's AI business has undergone many changes, and its personnel are also facing "replacement of the old with the new". "Intelligent Emergence" reported exclusively that at the end of 2025, Yu Dong, the deputy director of Tencent AI Lab, resigned for personal reasons. Subsequently, the voice team of AI Lab he was in charge of was fully merged into the Hunyuan multimodal department led by Bo Liefeng.
A more symbolic moment of the replacement of the old with the new occurred on March 20th, 2026. Tencent announced internally that it would abolish the AI Lab. Some personnel of the original team were transferred to the Large Language Model Department and reported to Yao Shunyu; some were transferred to the Industry - University - Research Cooperation Center under Tencent's Technology Engineering Group (TEG). Jiang Jie, the vice - president of Tencent and the former director of AI Lab, no longer manages the AI Lab, while other responsibilities remain unchanged.
On March 19th, at an internal Q&A session, Yao Shunyu explained the reason for the adjustment: to break down departmental barriers and make the R & D architecture of AI basic models younger and more direct.
The continuous organizational adjustments and personnel changes since 2025 have put Tencent's ambition to maintain its position as a giant in the AI era on the table.
Not long ago, Liu Chiping, the president of Tencent, mentioned in the earnings call on March 18th that Tencent invested 18 billion yuan in new AI products in 2025, and this amount will at least double in 2026.
Whether it's the large - model application "Yuanbao" spending 1 billion yuan on red envelopes during the Spring Festival or the recent almost fanatical response to "Lobster (the most popular open - source Agent framework at present)", Tencent's goal is to build users' awareness and seize the traffic entrance in the AI era.
Of course, quickly catching up with the first - tier in terms of basic model capabilities is still the most important proposition for Tencent at present. According to "Intelligent Emergence", in April 2026, Tencent's upcoming new - generation Hunyuan model aims to catch up with the first - tier models such as Qwen, DeepSeek, and Doubao in the medium - sized model field.
As the talent competition intensifies, the AI competition among giants will become even more intense.
Cover source | AI - generated
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