Tian Yonglong, a former technical researcher at OpenAI, has recently joined Tencent (0700) Large Language Model department to spearhead the development of Vision-Language Models, according to mainland China media reports.
The report points out that this is the second time Tencent has poached talent from OpenAI, following its poaching of Yao Shunyu, a senior researcher at OpenAI. Tian and Yao are Tsinghua alumnus, and former OpenAI colleague.
Yao left OpenAI in September 2025 to join Tencent’s chief AI scientist at the office of the chief executive officer, concurrently heading the AI Infra and Large Language Model Departments.
Tian built extensive experience in machine vision and multimodal representation learning. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University and a master’s degree from the Multimedia Laboratory at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he specialized in core vision algorithms. He earned his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, under computer scientist Phillip Isola.
Tian’s industry experience includes serving as a senior research scientist at Google Research and later Google DeepMind, where he focused on visual perception models until May 2024. In October 2024, he joined OpenAI, where he was heavily involved in the iteration of the firm's core multimodal generative technologies before his recent departure to return to China.
