Tencent AI Lab Deputy Director Yu Dong Reportedly Departs as Hunyuan Team Continues Restructuring
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Tencent AI Lab’s Deputy Director, Dr. Yu Dong, a leading expert in speech and NLP, has reportedly left the company amid ongoing restructuring and talent consolidation within Tencent’s foundation model “Hunyuan” team.
According to multiple independent sources cited by AI Emergence, Yu Dong, Deputy Director and Distinguished Scientist at Tencent AI Lab, has recently left Tencent for personal career development reasons. Tencent has not issued an official response.
Yu Dong is a leading expert in speech processing and deep learning. He joined Tencent in 2017 and previously served as Deputy Director of Tencent AI Lab and Chief Scientist at Tencent YouTu Lab. He is among the early researchers who successfully applied deep learning to speech recognition and played a key role in advancing speech, NLP, and digital human technologies within Tencent. He also contributed to Hunyuan, Tencent's foundation model, focusing on multimodal generation and text research.
Meanwhile, Tencent continues to consolidate talent and resources around large models. In the second half of 2025, former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu joined Tencent. The company has also established new internal units within its Technology Engineering Group (TEG), including AI Infra and AI Data divisions, to centralize previously fragmented model development efforts and strengthen foundational model capabilities.
Source：AI Emergence
