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Yu,
who has been appointed as deputy head of Tencent's AI Lab
division, will run the new lab as well as spearhead research in
speech recognition and natural language understanding, the
company said.
Tencent, which owns the popular WeChat messaging app, is Asia's
most valuable company with a market capitalization of nearly
$300 billion.
Shenzhen-headquartered Tencent is one of a number of Chinese
technology juggernauts that are stepping up efforts in AI
research. Tencent's WeChat has more than 889 million monthly
active users.
Tencent has more than 50 researchers and more than 200 engineers
at its AI Lab in Shenzhen, which was established in April 2016,
according to the company.
China's "Big Three" tech firms - Tencent, Baidu Inc and Alibaba
- have been competing to attract top-notch talent.
Yu, a speech recognition and deep learning expert, was the
principal researcher at Microsoft Research Institute's Speech
and Dialog Group before joining Tencent.
Baidu suffered a setback to its AI ambitions after its chief
scientist Andrew Ng resigned in March, shortly before Tencent
announced it has poached Baidu's former big data director Zhang
Tong to head up its AI Lab.
Yu is looking to build a team of around 20 for the Seattle lab,
according to Tencent.
(Reporting by Sijia Jiang; Editing by Richard Pullin)
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