Tencent Merges Hunyuan LLM and Multimodal Teams Under AI Scientist Shunyu Yao
Tencent has merged its Hunyuan large language model (LLM) and multimodal departments into a single, unified Foundation Model Department. The new department will be led by Tencent's Chief AI Scientist, Shunyu Yao, to improve research efficiency and explore all-modal AI capabilities. This organizational restructuring consolidates Tencent's AI development under the creator of the influential ReAct framework. It signals Tencent's strategic shift towards unified, multimodal foundation models to better compete in the rapidly evolving global AI landscape. Shunyu Yao, a Princeton PhD and former OpenAI researcher who worked on "operator" and "deep research" agents, will oversee the new department. The merger follows the successful deployment of Tencent's Hy3 LLM and the open-sourcing of Hunyuan 3D World Model 2.0.
## BACKGROUND
The ReAct (Reasoning and Acting) framework is a paradigm for AI agents that combines chain-of-thought reasoning with action execution, allowing models to interact with external tools to solve complex tasks. LMArena (formerly Chatbot Arena) is a widely recognized public platform that hosts blind tests to evaluate and rank the performance of various large language models based on human preferences.