Tencent unveils Hy4 as open-weight AI race with DeepSeek, Z.ai, Alibaba heats up

Chinese technology firm Tencent has unveiled its newest AI model, Hy4, as it intensifies the open-weight AI competition with DeepSeek, Z.ai, and Alibaba. Unveiled on Wednesday, Hy4 boasts advanced agentic capabilities tailored for powering Tencent's enterprise software. Unlike previous versions, Hy4 introduces visual understanding, enabling it to process images, interpret complex charts, and perform visual mathematical reasoning.

This marks the first time Tencent's AI lineup has become a top-tier open-weight model, though it still lags behind closed-source systems in highly technical areas like research-level mathematics and long-horizon coding. Acknowledging this, Tencent plans to achieve this gap through continued pre-training and post-training.

The Hy4 series features 770 billion parameters, a significant 2.6-fold increase from the 295 billion parameters in its predecessor, Hy3. Anticipating further advancements, Tencent plans to roll out Hy5 in the future, accompanied by a lightweight Hy4 Flash version that will reduce task costs. The company is also building recursive self-improvement into Hy4, enhancing its capacity for autonomous AI research and development.

Tencent's "co-design" strategy involves developing the AI model in tandem with real-world enterprise products. Hy4 has been integrated into its WorkBuddy workplace AI tool, achieving an average score of 83.18 and a 96.15% pass rate in internal evaluations. This launch underscores Tencent's determination to maintain its position in China's intense AI race, where domestic rivals DeepSeek, Z.ai, and Alibaba already pose a challenge to global competitors.

A preview version of Hy4, launched in late August, ranked 23rd globally on the Code Arena's WebDev leaderboard for real-world coding tasks. With the release of Hy4, Tencent has advanced towards its objective of developing frontier, state-of-the-art AI models, significantly increasing its capital expenditure by 176% year-on-year to 52.8 billion yuan (US$7.9 billion) to fuel its AI initiatives, even though it pushed the company's free cash flow into negative territory for the period.

To address cybersecurity concerns, Tencent restricted Hy4's hacking capabilities during training, filtering out content related to exploit development, reverse engineering, and penetration testing to prevent the amplification of potentially harmful capabilities.