Shunyu Yao

Shunyu Yao is an AI researcher formerly at OpenAI who has become known for framing the industry's competitive shift toward what he calls the "second half" of AI — moving beyond model training supremacy to focus on agent evaluation, evolution, and real-world deployment . In this framing, which 线性资本 (Linear Capital) highlighted in late 2025, the decisive factor becomes who can build richer, more iterative application scenarios rather than simply train smarter base models . Yao's earlier research work includes collaboration with the founding team of Mindverse (established October 2023), a startup building continuously learning agent models; he co-authored the FireAct paper on agent fine-tuning with them, research that evolved into the LoRA SFT and large-scale LoRA reinforcement learning systems the company later developed . Elsewhere's corpus does not cover his educational background or tenure details at OpenAI beyond these research and conceptual contributions.