China poaches more AI talent from the U.S. as it eyes the next 'super-app'

BEIJING — A former OpenAI researcher is now chief AI scientist for Tencent in China, and wants to build artificial general intelligence.

AI with human-level or above capabilities (AGI) has long been the goal of U.S. companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet, which acquired British startup DeepMind .

Chinese companies rushing to catch up on AI and facing U.S. chip controls have instead focused on ways to use the technology in applications from factories to consumer electronics. Baidu CEO Robin Li previously predicted it would take until at least 2034 to achieve AGI, in contrast to Elon Musk's 2026 forecast at the time.

But as Chinese companies grab talent from Silicon Valley, they're increasingly bringing the U.S. vision with them.

"My personal goal is that in China we should establish a long-term AGI organization," said Tencent Chief AI Scientist Yao Shunyu, who joined the company in the last year after leaving his OpenAI role, in remarks CNBC translated from Mandarin.

Yao was discussing the next stage of AI development on-stage Friday with Tencent's Cloud executive Dowson Tong at the company's event in Beijing co-organized with local authorities. A senior Beijing official gave opening remarks.

Yao said Friday his vision for AGI will require foundational knowledge, products and frontier exploration.

"I don't think ChatGPT or Claude will be the only super-app," Yao said, saying untapped potential is in the "trillions of dollars." Performance of an AI tool is most important, followed by cost, he said, adding that the path forward in China is with smaller AI models and more consistent performance on basic tasks.