Tencent Unveils Hunyuan, Its Proprietary Large Foundation Model on Tencent Cloud

On September 7, 2023, Tencent unveiled its new foundation model called Hunyuan at the Global Digital Ecosystem Summit in Shenzhen. This model is now available for testing and app development through APIs on Tencent Cloud for Chinese enterprises.

Hunyuan Unlocks New Abilities for Enterprises

Chinese enterprises can now access Hunyuan through Tencent‘s public cloud platform and customize it to meet their specific requirements. The platform offers robust Chinese language processing capabilities, advanced logical reasoning, and reliable task execution abilities.

Tencent‘s foundation model supports various functions such as image creation, copywriting, text recognition, and customer service. These functions are crucial in industries like finance, public services, social media, e-commerce, transportation, games, and more.

This enables businesses to develop robust tools and train their own distinct, advanced models using Tencent‘s Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) offering, which was initially introduced in June of this year, it provides economically feasible, industry-specific large models with over 50 solutions covering 20 key industries. This establishes a positive feedback loop where businesses enhance their large models with Hunyuan to create exceptionally intelligent services throughout their operations.

Hunyuan is connected to 50 of Tencent‘s own products, such as Tencent Cloud, Tencent Advertising, Tencent Games, Tencent Fintech, Tencent Meeting, Tencent Docs, Weixin Search, QQ Browser, and other core offerings. Here are a few examples:

• Tencent Meeting now includes a Hunyuan-powered AI assistant that can perform complex tasks, such as generating meeting minutes based on natural language instructions and prompts from users.

• With the integration of Hunyuan, Tencent Docs can support various text creation scenarios and generate standard format text with just one click.

• In advertising, Hunyuan supports the creation of engaging shopping guides that merchants can use for advertising purposes.

“In launching Hunyuan and making it available to domestic enterprises, Tencent has opted for an approach that balances the exciting performance of consumer-facing, large-model AI powered chatbots, with the pragmatic need for the business community to increase operational efficiencies, reduce costs, protect privacy as well as proprietary data.” Dowson Tong, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and CEO of Tencent Cloud and Smart Industries Group (CSIG), stated this at the flagship annual Summit.

According to Jie Jiang, Vice President of Tencent, the company has transitioned from model algorithms to machine learning frameworks and now to AI infrastructure. This marks the era of the “comprehensive embrace of large models” for Tencent. Currently, their Hunyuan model boasts over 100 billion parameters and utilizes more than two trillion tokens in pre-training data.

Hunyuan will gradually expand its reach to encompass a wider range of businesses and applications.

International Business Posts Strong Growth

Tencent Cloud’s international business has expanded to cover major regions including Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and others. Currently, Tencent Cloud operates data center facilities in 26 geographic areas across five continents with 70 availability zones and exabyte-level storage capacity.

In the first half of 2023, international business experienced significant revenue growth in several regions including Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Europe, and the Middle East. The success of Tencent Cloud’s Global Partner Ecosystem played a crucial role in driving its international business forward. As of mid-2023, the ecosystem has expanded to include 11,000 partners and partner-driven revenue has grown by 66 percent compared to the previous year.

“As we enter our seventh successful year of operating in international markets, our expansion strategy is to support Chinese enterprises going overseas, while concurrently facilitating the entry of foreign businesses into China,” Tong mentioned during the Summit.“This year, we also added more development teams in global markets spanning Latin America and the Middle East, to name just a few.”

Tencent Cloud’s international business expansion strategy is based on three pillars: enhancing capabilities and internationalizing products, strengthening partnerships and ecosystems, and driving innovation in immersive convergence. It offers solutions for various industries including internet, gaming, finance, tourism and hospitality, automotive, as well as retail.

With the introduction of Hunyuan and a successful global business, Tencent is dedicated to fostering open collaboration within the ecosystem. This will ultimately benefit domestic businesses by providing them with high-quality model services from Tencent. At the same time, international businesses can utilize Tencent to enter the Chinese market and also undergo their own digital transformations using Tencent‘s products and services.