Yu Wenhao, a former senior researcher at Tencent AI Lab Seattle, officially joined OpenAI last month as an AGI Researcher. He confirmed on LinkedIn that he will help shape the next generation of AI models and contribute to building AGI.
Yu earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Notre Dame in 2023. Over the past two years, his research has focused on reinforcement learning post-training, reasoning, and agents for large models. He has published over 30 papers at top conferences, accumulated more than 5,700 citations, and won the EMNLP 2023 Outstanding Paper Award. During his time at Tencent, he led the R-Zero training paradigm, which explores having models generate hard problems for each other and compete in game-like scenarios to achieve self-evolution without any human-labeled data. He also led the WebVoyager agent project, which has been adopted by OpenAI and Google.
Yu's deep expertise in self-play and agents aligns closely with OpenAI's current strategic focus on using reinforcement learning to boost model reasoning capabilities.