Overview
- Pang Tianyu said he will join Tencent on February 4, 2026 as chief research scientist for the Hunyuan model team and head of multimodal reinforcement learning.
- Tencent stated that Pang will lead reinforcement-learning research for multimodal models with an initial emphasis on generative-model techniques.
- On January 28, Tencent open-sourced Hunyuan Image 3.0 for image-to-image tasks, integrated it into the Yuanbao AI assistant, and reported first-tier standing on LMArena’s image-editing benchmark.
- Pang holds a Tsinghua University PhD under Prof. Zhu Jun, has 70-plus first‑author papers at top venues with more than 15,000 citations, and previously served as a senior research scientist at Sea AI Lab in Singapore.
- In December 2025, Tencent named former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu as chief AI scientist, and CEO Ma Huateng later described the Hunyuan effort as undergoing a “deep reconstruction” driven by talent recruitment.