(Yicai) July 9 -- Tencent Holdings has hired a second former researcher from US ChatGPT developer OpenAI to the Chinese internet giant's large language model department, according to a source at the firm.

Tian Yonglong will participate in the research and development of visual-language models, the source told Yicai yesterday. In December, Shenzhen-based Tencent appointed former OpenAI Researcher Vinces Yao as chief artificial intelligence scientist and head of the AI Infra and LLM departments.

Tian has a doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with his main research areas including computer vision, visual representation learning, and generative models. He worked at Google-backed AI firm DeepMind before joining OpenAI, where he worked alongside Yao.

Yao has done a lot to simplify things at Tencent, Senior Executive Vice President Dowson Tong said in an interview with Yicai last month. The company's LLM Hunyuan has also made great progress, he pointed out.

Yao, who led the development of AI agents at OpenAI, reports directly to Tencent President Martin Lau. He has led the evolution of Hunyuan, unveiling the Hy3 preview version in April and the Hy3 version early this month, while also promoting the joint design of the LLM and consumer application Yuanbao.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Martin Kadiev