(Yicai) Aug. 19 -- Tencent Holdings has made new personnel changes at the multimodal team of its HunYuan large language model, less than a month after establishing a new foundational model department, according to a source close to the Chinese internet giant.

The roles of Bo Liefeng, the former head of Hunyuan's multimodal department, will likely change, while a senior researcher who recently left Kuaishou Technology's Kling AI has returned to Tencent, but joined its gaming business, according to the source. Bo, who joined the Hunyuan team in July last year, primarily oversees the multimodal business.

On July 24, Tencent announced it will merge the Hunyuan LLM department and the multimodal model department, forming a single foundation model department led by Chief AI Scientist Yao Shunyu.

Tian Yonglong, a PhD graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who previously worked with Yao at OpenAI, joined the Hunyuan multimodal team early last month, while Zhong Zhao, head of Hunyuan's text-to-video and text-to-image algorithms, left the company. Responsible for developing vision-language models, Tian reports directly to Yao.

Tian may take on more responsibilities and become the de facto head of Hunyuan's multimodal business under Yao, the source pointed out.

The adjustments come as Hunyuan has made limited progress in the multimodal market. Tencent launched the HunyuanImage-3.0 image generation model last September and the HunyuanVideo-1.5 video generation model last November, but has not released a new multimodal model since.

The HunyuanVideo-1.5 has 8.3 billion parameters but does not support end-to-end audio-visual synchronized generation, meaning that it cannot generate a video with synchronized sound and visuals in a single step based solely on one prompt. It has also failed to solve the problem of synchronizing lip movements with speech.

Tencent rivals Alibaba Group Holding, ByteDance, and Kling AI have each made breakthroughs in generating videos with synchronized audio and visuals and advanced their multimodal reasoning capabilities this year. For example, TikTok-owner ByteDance released successive updates to its Seedance 2.0 and Seedance 2.5 models.

Editor: Martin Kadiev