Tencent’s AI chief dismisses lag concerns, says race a ‘long-term game’

Yao Shunyu, the former OpenAI researcher now leading Tencent Holdings’ artificial intelligence model development, pushed back against concerns that the tech giant is slow in AI, arguing that the race is just beginning with massive untapped opportunities in coding agents and embodied intelligence.

“AI is a long-term game, with the second half of the race just starting,” said Yao, chief AI scientist at Tencent, comparing the current state to the development of personal computers in the 1970s.

Yao noted that he did not expect OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude Code to be the only super apps. “That would be a very bleak world. Instead, a steady stream of new opportunities will inevitably emerge,” he said.

Yao, who is also head of Tencent’s Hunyuan large language model (LLM) and AI Infra, was speaking at the company’s Cloud AI Industry Applications Summit on Friday

“While coding agents and productivity will undoubtedly become more critical, there are trillion-dollar markets yet to be filled as we are witnessing the emergence of new things including multimodal AI and embodied intelligence,” he said.

Yao acknowledged that detours and setbacks were normal in the early exploration of LLMs and AI products, but stressed that the key to the second half of the AI race was being honest with shortcomings and patient when it came to making adjustments.