Chinese tech companies from Tencent Holdings to AgiBot have named millennials and even Gen Z talent as chief scientists to lead cutting-edge research into artificial intelligence and robotics.

The most watched is Vinces Yao Shunyu, who turns 28 this year. He is a former researcher at OpenAI and joined Tencent in December as chief AI scientist under the CEO’s office, reporting directly to president Martin Lau Chi-ping.

A graduate of Princeton University and Tsinghua University, Yao was a core contributor to OpenAI’s first AI agents, Operator and Deep Research. In January, the first paper co-authored by him after joining the Chinese company was published, arguing that “context learning” should be placed at the centre of future model design to optimise AI models.

Besides Yao, Tencent retains renowned computer vision expert Zhang Zhengyou as chief scientist, who joined in 2018 after 20 years at Google. In 2013, he received the Helmholtz Prize, an award given biannually at the International Conference on Computer Vision, for the Zhang’s Camera Calibration Method, a technique named after him which improved 3D computer vision.

The companies that recently filled up the chief scientist role included PrimeBot, the robotics arm under Swancor Advanced Materials, a Shanghai-listed firm now controlled by Chinese robotics unicorn AgiBot.

In early January, PrimeBot named Peking University professor Dong Hao as chief scientist. Born after 1990, Dong is a tenured associate professor at the university’s School of Computer Science who obtained his PhD degree at Imperial College London.

AgiBot’s own chief scientist, hired last year, is also a millennial. Luo Jianlan, 33, previously worked at Google’s “moon shot factory” Google X and AI research lab Google DeepMind. He has closely collaborated with renowned computer scientist Sergey Levine, a co-founder of San Francisco-based AI start-up Physical Intelligence.