Tencent unveils Hunyuan foundation AI model for enterprises as public debut of internet giant’s chatbot remains on hold

Chinese video gaming and social media giant Tencent Holdings has launched its foundation artificial intelligence (AI) model called Hunyuan, as the country’s most valuable company bets on its vast ecosystem to help drive the adoption of more ChatGPT-like services across the mainland.

Hunyuan, a large language model (LLM) that has more than 100 billion parameters and been pre-trained with over 2 trillion tokens, is now available for enterprises in China to test and build apps via the company’s cloud-computing arm Tencent Cloud, according to a Thursday announcement by Tencent vice-president Jiang Jie at the main forum of the company’s 2023 Global Digital Ecosystem Summit in Shenzhen.

A foundation model is a deep-learning algorithm, trained on mountains of raw data from the internet, that can be adapted to accomplish tasks in various AI applications. An early example of a foundation AI model is the LLM GPT-3 used by ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

Tencent’s Hunyuan provides a range of functions, including image creation, copywriting and text recognition, that can be applied in multiple industries such as finance, social media, e-commerce and video gaming.

This AI model is already integrated into the company’s various business units including Tencent Cloud, Tencent Games and WeChat. It is also being used in the company’s daily operations to help programmers write code and support customer service staff in answering user inquiries.