Tencent releases 770B-parameter open-source AI model Hy4

Tencent Holdings released and open-sourced Hy4 Preview on Friday, a 770-billion-parameter foundation model that represents a major leap from its predecessor and positions the company as a more serious contender in China's intensifying AI race.

A Giant Step From Hy3

The Hy4 Preview is a mixture-of-experts model with 49 billion activated parameters and a one-million-token context window, according to a company statement. That marks a substantial upgrade from Hy3, which launched in April with 295 billion total parameters, 21 billion activated parameters, and a 256,000-token context window.bloomberg+2

In blind engineering tests conducted by 163 internal Tencent experts across 203 tasks, Hy4 Preview scored an average of 2.99 out of 4.00, narrowly edging Z.AI's GLM-5.3 at 2.92 and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 at 2.94. On third-party benchmarks, according to Bloomberg, the model's performance varied against domestic rivals including Alibaba Group Holding's ↗ 1.28% Qwen 3.8 Max.news.aibase+2

The model has been open-sourced on HuggingFace, GitHub, and Modelscope, and is accessible through Tencent Cloud TokenHub and OpenRouter. It has been integrated into Tencent products including WorkBuddy, CodeBuddy, Yuanbao, and ima. Pricing is set at 6 yuan per million input tokens and 18 yuan per million output tokens.21jingji+3

Betting Big on AI Infrastructure

The Shenzhen-based company — long seen as a laggard among Chinese tech giants in the AI model race — has dramatically ramped up spending. Capital expenditures on AI projects and computing surged 176% to 52.8 billion yuan ($7.9 billion) in the quarter ended June. Tencent Chief Strategy Officer James Mitchell said on the company's earnings call that the spending is primarily directed at training larger Hunyuan foundation models and providing inference support for models running behind WorkBuddy, including DeepSeek.21jingji+1

Signs of Traction

The investment appears to be yielding results. WorkBuddy is now China's most popular desktop office agent, prompting competitive responses from ByteDance and Alibaba in the enterprise AI market. Since rebuilding its AI infrastructure in February, Tencent's Hunyuan team has averaged one major model release every two months.news.qq+1

Tencent acknowledged that Hy4 Preview remains an early version with known limitations, including excessive self-verification in complex tasks and a lack of multimodal capabilities. A more complete edition of Hy4 with further pre- and post-training improvements is expected soon.theedgemalaysia+2