Tencent HY is set to hire OpenAI research scientist Tian Yonglong as the new head of its multimodal model team, reporting to chief AI scientist Yao Shunyu, according to sources. This would mark the second major OpenAI researcher to join Tencent within a year, following Yao who left OpenAI in September 2025. Tian's academic background includes undergraduate studies at Tsinghua University, a master's degree at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a PhD at MIT EECS. His Google Scholar profile shows 28,778 citations with an h-index of 35 and 3,436 citations in 2026 alone. After his PhD, Tian joined Google DeepMind before moving to OpenAI, where he focused on machine perception, generative models, and representation learning. His most influential academic contribution is Supervised Contrastive Learning, and his more recent work, Fluid (October 2024), demonstrated that autoregressive text-to-image generation models using continuous tokens significantly outperform discrete token approaches. Tian's addition follows the departure of former multimodal head Liu Wei in late 2024 and subsequent hires from Microsoft Research Asia and Alibaba's Tongyi lab.