Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1576
“LatePost” exclusively learned that Qie Xiaohu, vice president of Tencent and head of the information and service line of PCG (Platform and Content Business Group), has resigned. It’s unclear where the veteran technologist will go next.
Qie Xiaohu joined Tencent in September 2020 as the vice president of the company, responsible for functions related to the PCG technology line. After taking over PCG Information and Service Line in December 2021, he will manage QQ Browser, Sogou Search, Sogou Input Method and other businesses.
Zeng Yu, vice president of Tencent and vice president of PCG technology, will be directly responsible for the business in charge of Qie Xiaohu. Zeng Yu joined Tencent in 2002 and was promoted to vice president of the company in 2012. He is a senior technical expert and manager of Tencent.
Peng Zhijian, former vice president of Tencent, once said that Qie Xiaohu is “one of the three engineers that domestic Internet companies most want to poach from Google.” Xie Xiaohu joined Google in 2003, which was still in its start-up stage, and became one of the core development members of its advertising system (Adwords). Also on the team at the time was Huang Zheng, who later founded Pinduoduo.
Qie Xiaohu has worked at Google for 12 years, serving as Google’s global technical director and vice president of Google China Research Institute. After leaving in 2015, he joined Xiaohongshu and Didi as CTO successively, but he did not catch up with the opportunities like Google.
When Qie Xiaohu joined Xiaohongshu in 2015, Xiaohongshu was still a cross-border e-commerce platform opened by hundreds of thousands of people every day. Its founding team has not yet made up its mind to fully transform the Internet community. At the end of 2018, he took over as the CTO of Didi’s online car-hailing platform company. At that time, Didi integrated the technical resources self-built by various industry lines during the subsidy war. “He doesn’t have much room to play technically, and it’s more a test of overall management ability.” A Didi source said. Only one year later, Xie Xiaohu was transferred to be the head of the Science and Technology Ecology and Development Department.
When I joined Tencent in 2020, it was at the time when the PCG business group was preparing for technological reform. In the past, Tencent has been criticized for placing too much emphasis on product capabilities and underestimating technology research and development and data construction. In 2020, under the leadership of Tencent COO Ren Yuxin, PCG launched technological reforms, including the full implementation of the middle-Taiwan system and the implementation of algorithm recommendation models in various products.
“LatePost” learned that in addition to the daily work, the products and technology lines of each business in PCG have undertaken several reform projects for large and medium-sized business groups. For example, Kandian is responsible for information flow, and Tencent Video is responsible for video editing. Decoding and Weishi are responsible for labeling capabilities.
When Qie Xiaohu and a group of technical talents joined Tencent, they were considered to have brought a new atmosphere to PCG. A person from PCG told “LatePost” that they have a good reputation at the executive level and brought Silicon Valley’s culture of advocating simplicity and efficiency. The background tools are integrated.
The underlying technology and architecture of PCG’s various products are relatively old, some of which have existed for more than ten years, and it is very difficult to reform while operating. Therefore, Qie Xiaohu and Zeng Yu, head of the PCG technology line, have been carrying out reforms in a “gradual” way. For example, first of all, it is necessary to solve the problem of repetitive technical “wheel-making” within a large number of business groups. “It takes more than two years to squeeze the water.” A Tencent PCG person said.
According to “LatePost”, Xie Xiaohu said directly at an internal meeting in early 2023 that the PCG technology line has focused more on engineering adjustments in the past few years, and the algorithm has not changed much. It is understood that Tencent’s PCG technology line will also make more reforms in the algorithm. For this reason, PCG has also set up an AI committee, which will focus on discussing the specific application scenarios of the algorithm, planning specific vertical application fields and combining business practices. .
Compared with a lot of attempts in technological reform, Qie Xiaohu has relatively restrained intervention in the products (QQ browser, Sogou search, Sogou input method) in the “convincing line”.
In 2022, shortly after Qie Xiaohu took over the “Convincing Line”, Tencent launched an organizational and business adjustment based on the concept of “zero-based thinking” (starting from scratch) to reduce costs and increase efficiency. A person from Tencent’s convincing line told “LatePost” that under the group’s grand strategy, Qie Xiaohu has also made comprehensive adjustments to the convincing line from the aspects of strategy, technology, products, and commercialization.
For example, the Sogou search team has made a relatively large contraction and rejected the plan to sink the content of the QQ browser information flow. In addition, he also focused on promoting the development of Sogou input method. According to a PCG source, the current daily active users of Sogou Input Method have stabilized at 600-700 million. Next, Sogou Input Method will also start a commercial attempt.
When managing specific businesses, Qie Xiaohu does not easily leave behind conclusions. A person from Tencent PCG described him: “He is unsmiling and rarely takes the initiative to answer conversations.” A person who reported to him said, “I hardly heard him say ‘I have an idea’, ‘My point of view is’, but It is necessary for the subordinates to control the rhythm and provide one-way input to him.”
“LatePost” previously reported that Xinfu Line will turn losses into profits in 2022; all businesses of Tencent PCG where it is located will also be profitable by the end of 2022, and the business group’s annual new profits will reach billions of yuan. Among them, Tencent Video’s annual revenue in 2022 will exceed 10 billion, and it has started to make profits since October. Tencent News will turn losses into profits in the last quarter of 2022. At the same time, QQ’s mobile monthly active accounts in the fourth quarter also achieved a year-on-year increase of 3.6% to 572 million.
Xie Xiaohu has also participated in specific technical research since he was at Tencent. According to the public information we consulted, in 2022 he will be listed as the signed author (not the first author) of five papers, covering areas including image perception, video text retrieval, etc.
Now OpenAI’s GPT has set off another round of artificial intelligence revolution. Companies and technical experts in the Internet industry have another possibility to choose again.
This article is transferred from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1576
This site is only for collection, and the copyright belongs to the original author.