Tencent Holdings has initiated a major restructuring at its artificial intelligence group with the promotion of recent high-profile recruit Vinces Yao Shunyu, a former researcher at OpenAI.
Without mentioning his Chinese name, Shenzhen-based Tencent’s announcement on Wednesday came with a photo of Yao. He was tasked to lead the company’s new AI infrastructure efforts, including the development of large language models (LLMs).
Yao’s official position is chief AI scientist under the CEO’s office at Tencent, reporting directly to president Martin Lau Chi-ping.
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As part of Tencent’s AI reorganisation, the Technology Engineering Group (TEG), one of the company’s six major business units, established two new departments.
The “AI Infra” department was “responsible for developing the technical capabilities of large-model training and inference platforms”, while the “Data Computing Platform” team was tasked to “establish comprehensive full-stack service capabilities for constructing large-scale integrated big data and machine learning”, according to the internal announcement confirmed by three sources.
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Yao was also named the head of TEG’s LLM development and the AI Infra department, reporting to the group’s president Lu Shan.
The company renamed its existing data platform team as “AI Data”, which was assigned to provide “high-quality data services for large-scale model pre-training, post-training and model applications”.