Former OpenAI researcher Yonglong Tian has been named head of multimodal models for Tencent’s Hunyuan team, according to a report. He has joined Tencent’s CEO and President Office and reports directly to Shunyu Yao, who leads the company’s foundation-model development.

Tian joined Tencent in July after working on computer vision, representation learning and generative models at Google Research, Google DeepMind and OpenAI. His appointment follows Tencent’s July decision to combine its large-language-model and multimodal-model teams into a single foundation-model department under Shunyu Yao. [Guandian, in Chinese]