Former UBTECH (09880.HK) co-CTO Liao Hongtao has joined Tencent’s Futian
Laboratory to lead its embodied-intelligence program; his team has started
recruiting for roles in the area. Futian Laboratory —formally the Embodied
Intelligence Guangdong Provincial Laboratory — is a provincial-level AI lab in
Shenzhen co-established by the Greater Bay Area Digital Economy Research
Institute (IDEA Research Institute) and Tencent and was inaugurated on Nov. 15,
2024. Tencent chief scientist and RoboticsX director Zhang Zhengyou is lab
director; IDEA scientist chair Zhang Lei and the RoboticsX core team participate
in management. The lab is targeting breakthroughs in embodied-intelligence
perception, decision and interaction technologies to advance home service robots
and related applications.