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

Chinese tech giant Tencent has unveiled its latest artificial intelligence model, Hy4, in an effort to compete with open-weight rivals such as DeepSeek, Z.ai, and Alibaba Group. The Shenzhen-based company introduced Hy4 on Wednesday, which boasts visual understanding capabilities and enhanced agentic abilities to power its enterprise software ecosystem.

Hy4 can process images, analyze complex charts, and perform visual mathematical reasoning. This marks the first time Tencent's AI lineup has become one of the strongest open-weight models available, although it still lags behind closed-source systems on challenging internal benchmarks for research-level mathematics, long-horizon coding, model self-improvement, and advanced visual question answering.

Tencent plans to scale both pre-training and post-training to narrow the gap with competitors, and is also working on a next-generation model, Hy5, and a lightweight Hy4 Flash version to reduce task costs. The Hy4 series features 770 billion parameters, a 2.6-fold increase from its predecessor's 295 billion parameters, and a soon-to-come lightweight version aims to slash task costs even further.

Furthermore, Tencent is laying the groundwork for recursive self-improvement in Hy4, allowing the model to carry out autonomous AI research and development. The company is following a "co-design" strategy, developing the AI model alongside products used in real enterprise workflows. This launch highlights Tencent's efforts to maintain its position in China's intense AI race, where domestic rivals such as DeepSeek, Z.ai, and Alibaba Group are already challenging global peers in the open-weight landscape.