Pang Tianyu, the post-95s head of Reinforcement Learning (RL) at Tencent Hunyuan, has reportedly resigned less than nine months after joining the team.

Beating AI News Flash: A post on Shen Ma’s WeChat Moments reveals that Pang Tianyu, Chief Research Scientist of Tencent’s Hunyuan and Head of Multimodal Reinforcement Learning Technology, has left his role and is likely to launch a startup next. Pang, a Tsinghua University Computer Science PhD advised by Professor Zhu Jun, previously served as Senior Research Scientist at Singapore’s Sea AI Lab. He led multimodal reinforcement learning research at Hunyuan, covering areas including image generation and vision-language models. In June, Tencent open-sourced the multimodal reinforcement learning framework UniRL, with Pang listed as a contributing author; the framework was updated to v0.2.0 in October. In July, Tencent merged Hunyuan’s Large Language Model Division and Multimodal Model Division to form the Basic Model Division, overseen by Yao Shunyu. That same month, Hu Han, Head of Hunyuan Multimodal Understanding, left to start a business. In September, former OpenAI researcher Tian Yonglong took over as Head of Hunyuan Multimodal.