Han Hu, head of multimodal understanding at Tencent’s Hunyuan unit, has reportedly tendered his resignation.
Before joining Tencent in early 2025, Hu was a principal researcher in the visual computing group at Microsoft Research Asia. At Tencent, he led work on vision foundation models. Following an organizational reshuffle, he moved to a “frontier” advanced technology research group within the large language model (LLM) department, where he oversaw multimodal understanding research and reported to Yao Shunyu. Hu also worked on world models.
Yao, who heads Tencent’s LLM department, has been reviewing teams across the organization. The research group Hu previously belonged to may shift its focus toward frontier research on world models.
Personnel changes across Hunyuan have continued into the second half of 2026. In early July, former OpenAI researcher Tian Yonglong joined the LLM department. According to 36Kr, Tian will succeed Hu as head of R&D for vision-language models and report to Yao.
Since Yao joined Tencent, the company has focused on closing capability gaps and moving Hunyuan’s foundation models closer to the industry’s leading systems.
