Tencent unveils its Hunyuan foundation model

Background

The launch came amid a fast-moving race among Chinese technology companies to build large language models, and TechNode reported it as Tencent's entry into that race ^[3]. Tencent had already introduced its Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) offering in June 2023, with more than 50 industry solutions across 20 industries ^[1]. That offering gave enterprises a way to use AI services, and Hunyuan was the model at the center of Tencent's next step.

Large language models are systems trained on very large amounts of text to understand and generate language, and they can be adapted to many tasks. For a company, offering such a model through a cloud platform means that outside customers can call it without building their own training infrastructure.

What happened

On 7 September 2023 Tencent unveiled Hunyuan, its proprietary large foundation model, at its Global Digital Ecosystem Summit in Shenzhen ^[1]. TechNode had reported days earlier that Tencent would unveil the model at the summit, which was held on 7 and 8 September ^[3]. Dowson Tong, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and chief executive of its Cloud and Smart Industries Group, spoke at the summit ^[1].

Key details

Tencent vice-president Jiang Jie said Hunyuan has more than 100 billion parameters and more than two trillion tokens of pre-training data ^[1]. Enterprises in China could access the model through Tencent Cloud APIs, where they could test it, build applications and fine-tune it ^[1]. Tencent said Hunyuan was already integrated into 50 of its products, among them Tencent Meeting, Tencent Docs, Weixin Search and QQ Browser ^[1].

SCMP framed the launch as aimed at enterprises, and noted that a public chatbot was not yet available ^[2].

Impact

The launch gave Tencent a foundation model that it could offer to outside businesses and also use inside its own products ^[1][2]. For readers, the significance lies in what was made available: a model that companies could test, adapt and build on through a cloud service, rather than a public chat product. Later Hunyuan releases are covered in their own entries.