China's Tencent debuts large language AI model, says open for enterprise use

Tencent debuts AI model 'Hunyuan' with 100B parameters, 2T tokens. It can converse in Chinese & English, better than OpenAI's ChatGPT & has 30% less hallucination than Llama 2. AI experts say it's a step towards becoming China's AI champion.

Tencent Holdings said on Thursday companies could now use its large language artificial intelligence (AI) model "Hunyuan" as it premiered the much-awaited product amid a race by tech firms race to become China's AI champion.

The Chinese tech giant and owner of the WeChat social media platform conducted a demonstration before a live audience at a conference in Shenzhen, and said Hunyuan had become the foundation of more than 50 of its products and services.

"By July, there are more than 130 large language models in China," Jiang Jie, Tencent's vice president, said. "A war of a hundred models has begun."

Hunyuan's debut comes after several Chinese tech firms including Baidu Inc and SenseTime Group recently unveiled their own AI models.

(For top technology news of the day, subscribe to our tech newsletter Today’s Cache)

Tencent, China's most valuable internet company, said Hunyuan had more than 100 billion parameters and was trained with more than 2 trillion tokens, two metrics often used to measure AI models' power.

OpenAI's GPT-3 AI model contained 175 billion parameters in 2020 and Meta Platform Inc's Llama 2 model had 70 billion parameters in 2023.