Tencent announced it is merging its Hunyuan large language model department and its multimodal model department into a single Foundation Model department, led by chief AI scientist Yao Shunyu, with the goal of breaking the capability walls between text, image, video, and audio and exploring the upper limit of intelligence in a "unified all-modality model". Behind this organizational shift is a collective bet by top Chinese vendors on the AGI path. The current industry consensus: single-modality pretraining paradigms have hit their ceiling, and the next step must come from cross-modality joint training and unified representations. But "unified all-modality" is also a harder path than simply doing LLMs — different modalities differ hugely in token distribution, training cadence, and evaluation benchmarks, and a unified architecture can easily become "a bit of everything but master of none". Worth noting: this isn't Tencent's first Hunyuan team reshuffle. In July there was already a report that Hunyuan exited multimodal understanding and bet the bullet on world models; this merger is being read as "re-embracing multimodal". But look closer at the direction of the merger — bringing the LLM team in too — and what Tencent wants is not "LLM + multimodal plugins", but to fold multimodality into the pretraining core as a foundational capability. For China's large-model competitive landscape, this is a clear strategic statement: with DeepSeek V4 and the GLM series consistently leading the open-source leaderboards, and Alibaba Tongyi going the "model as API" route, Tencent has chosen the heaviest path — using organizational alignment to buy technical-route unification. In the short term, the merger will bring pain — both teams' engineering pipelines, evaluation systems, and data assets all need to be re-aligned. But in the medium-to-long term, if all-modality really is the necessary path to AGI, this "early integration" organizational cost could end up being Tencent's moat. At the end of the day, building foundation models has never been a sprint — it's a marathon. Organizational alignment comes first; only then can the technical route have a chance of working.