Latest news with #Hunyuan
Economic Times
14-05-2025
- Business
- Economic Times
Tencent Q1 revenue rises 13% on AI, gaming boost
Tencent Holdings, China's biggest technology company by market capitalisation, posted a 13% rise in first-quarter revenue on Wednesday, boosted by growth in gaming and AI-enhanced advertising. Tencent, also the world's largest video game company and operator of the WeChat messaging platform, reported revenue of 180 billion yuan ($24.97 billion) for the quarter ended March 31. The results exceeded the 174.6 billion yuan average estimate from analysts polled by LSEG. Net profit for the quarter was 47.8 billion yuan, compared with analyst expectations of 52.2 billion yuan, LSEG data showed. The revenue growth was led by robust performance in the gaming segment, as the company benefited from regulatory easing in China's gaming sector following stringent restrictions in previous years. For the quarter, domestic gaming revenue rose by 24% to 42.9 billion yuan, and international gaming revenue climbed 23% to 16.6 billion yuan. Titles that drove the growth included "Dungeon & Fighter Mobile", launched in May 2024, and shooting game "Delta Force," which debuted in September. Tencent has increased its AI investments, and in March said it would allocate a low double-digit percentage of 2025 revenue to capital expenditure, primarily for AI development. This follows the company's 39 billion yuan AI-focused spending in the fourth quarter of 2024. The company has developed its own proprietary large language model Hunyuan, and in March made public a version called T1. It has also been among the most open of its peers to adopting third-party technology. Tencent became the first major Chinese tech company to integrate technology from DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup that gained prominence early this year with its release of AI models that rival Western counterparts at lower development costs. The DeepSeek integration has been rolled out across Tencent's core products, including WeChat—the company's flagship messaging and payment platform with over 1 billion active users—and Yuanbao, Tencent's AI assistant. Revenues from marketing services for the quarter were 17.7 billion, up 22% year-on-year, partly because of robust AI-driven adtech upgrades whose benefits include more targeted advertising. The company's FinTech and Business Services segment, which includes consumer loans, wealth management and cloud services, posted revenue of 27.6 billion yuan, a 16% increase. ($1 = 7.2086 Chinese yuan renminbi)
Business Times
14-05-2025
- Business
- Business Times
Tencent quarterly revenue up 13% on AI, gaming boost
[BEIJING] Tencent Holdings, China's biggest technology company by market capitalisation, posted a 13 per cent rise in first-quarter revenue on Wednesday (May 14), boosted by growth in gaming and AI-enhanced advertising. Tencent, also the world's largest video game company and operator of the WeChat messaging platform, reported revenue of 180 billion yuan (S$32.4 billion) for the quarter ended Mar 31. The results exceeded the 174.6 billion yuan average estimate from analysts polled by LSEG. Net profit for the quarter was 47.8 billion yuan, compared with analyst expectations of 52.2 billion yuan, LSEG data showed. The revenue growth was led by robust performance in the gaming segment, as the company benefited from regulatory easing in China's gaming sector following stringent restrictions in previous years. For the quarter, domestic gaming revenue rose by 24 per cent to 42.9 billion yuan, and international gaming revenue climbed 23 per cent to 16.6 billion yuan. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Titles that drove the growth included Dungeon & Fighter Mobile, launched in May 2024, and shooting game Delta Force, which debuted in September. Tencent has increased its AI investments, and in March said it would allocate a low double-digit percentage of 2025 revenue to capital expenditure, primarily for AI development. This follows the company's 39 billion yuan AI-focused spending in the fourth quarter of 2024. The company has developed its own proprietary large language model Hunyuan, and in March made public a version called T1. It has also been among the most open of its peers to adopting third-party technology. Tencent became the first major Chinese tech company to integrate technology from DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup that gained prominence early this year with its release of AI models that rival Western counterparts at lower development costs. The DeepSeek integration has been rolled out across Tencent's core products, including WeChat – the company's flagship messaging and payment platform with over one billion active users – and Yuanbao, Tencent's own AI assistant. Revenues from marketing services for the quarter were 17.7 billion, up 22 per cent year on year, partly because of robust AI-driven adtech upgrades whose benefits include more targeted advertising. The company's FinTech and Business Services segment, which includes consumer loans, wealth management and cloud services, posted revenue of 27.6 billion yuan, a 16 per cent increase. REUTERS
TechCrunch
13-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Tencent hires WizardLM team, a Microsoft AI group with an odd history
WizardLM, a Beijing-based Microsoft AI research group, appears to have joined Tencent, the Chinese company that owns WeChat and blockbuster games like PUBG Mobile. In a post on X on Tuesday, Can Xu, a senior AI researcher who led a number of projects within WizardLM, said that he and the team left Microsoft to join Hunyuan, one of Tencent's AI development orgs. Over the past few months, Hunyuan has released AI models including video and 3D object generators. WizardLM has already released a Hunyuan-branded model, in fact: Hunyuan-TurboS 0416. In an X post, Qingfeng Sun, who claims to be a 'co-founder' of WizardLM, says that Hunyuan-TurboS 0416 outperforms 'open' AI models like Google's Gemma 3 series. It's not clear how many researchers are still a part of WizardLM or when the team might've left Microsoft. We've reached out to both Tencent and Microsoft for comment. WizardLM, formed several years ago, has a bit of a strange history. Last April, the team, then under Microsoft, released a family of AI models, WizardLM-2, that it said was competitive with OpenAI's GPT-4. But after only a day, Microsoft pulled WizardLM-2 from the web, saying that the models hadn't undergone 'toxicity testing.' 'We accidentally missed an item required in the model release process — toxicity testing,' the WizardLM team wrote in a post on X on April 16, 2024. 'We are currently completing this test quickly and then will re-release our model as soon as possible.' Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | REGISTER NOW The deletion came a little too late. Users quickly reuploaded the original WizardLM-2 models as well as customized, fine-tuned versions. Meanwhile, in a post on the AI dev platform Hugging Face, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said that Microsoft's move, which also wiped out other WizardLM models, harmed the Hugging Face community by breaking a number of open source projects. '[The WizardLM] models were collectively downloaded over a hundred thousand times a month,' Delangue wrote at the time. 'We apologize for the inconvenience & are trying to get in touch with the author [and] Microsoft in order to try to find a good resolution for community members.' At Tencent, it seems WizardLM will keep doing what it was doing, more or less: developing and releasing AI models. Tencent recently restructured its Hunyuan team, establishing two new units and upping its AI infrastructure spending. Tencent attributed its 8% year-over-year growth in Q1 2025 to the company's AI investments. Tencent has said that it plans to put 90 billion yuan, or around $12.49 billion, toward capital expenditures this year, much of which will fuel its AI efforts.
Forbes
30-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Global AI Race: China's Cost Revolution vs US Dominance
USA vs China - The battle for global AI dominance The artificial intelligence revolution isn't just about smarter chatbots or flashy demos–it's a geopolitical chess match with trillion-dollar stakes. While Silicon Valley giants dominate headlines, China is mounting a relentless challenge, blending state-backed strategy with cost innovation. Meanwhile, a European Court of Auditors report states that Europe risks becoming a bystander in this high-tech showdown. To unpack this complex race in simple terms, my next 2 pieces will explore who's really ahead in the AI race, the different approaches taken, and the factors that determine what comes next. Imagine two students taking the same exam, but one (the U.S.) spends years mastering fundamentals, while the other (China) focuses on practical problem-solving. Recent results show both scoring similarly–but the latter does it faster and cheaper. Chinese models like Tencent's Hunyuan-Large–a language model with 389 billion parameters (adjustable synapse weights, similar to how connections in your brain strengthen with learning)–now outperform Western rivals in key tests. Take the MMLU benchmark, an "AI IQ test" covering 57 subjects from law to biology. Hunyuan scores 90.8% accuracy, edging past Meta's Llama3 (88.5%). Alibaba's Qwen 2.5 rivals OpenAI's GPT-4 in coding tasks, while DeepSeek's R1 matches top U.S. models, reportedly at a fraction of the training cost (estimates vary between 1%-3%). 'China has—thanks to data, AI, and the entrepreneur ecosystem—rapidly evolved from a copycat into a true innovator,' says Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Sinovation Ventures and former president of Google China. And their focus on affordability could democratize AI for billions. But there's a catch. While China produced more AI publications (23.2%) and citations (22.6%) than any other country in 2023, the U.S. hosts 57% of elite researchers–for now. China's centralized approach pays dividends, despite reduced access to processor chips Picture a football team where the government picks players, calls plays, and funds training–this is akin to China's approach. Beijing designates tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba as "national champions," flooding them with synthetic data-AI-generated training material. Hunyuan-Large trained on 1.5 trillion tokens of synthetic content, dwarfing Western datasets. Harvard's Graham Allison regularly discusses the contrast between the U.S. leading the way in AI breakthroughs, but China's teamwork accelerating real-world use cases. This strategy has limits. U.S. export controls have crippled China's access to advanced chips like NVIDIA's A100, forcing reliance on Huawei's Ascend 910B–a homegrown processor, around 20% slower–nominally, like a family car racing a Ferrari. Yet Chinese firms adapt: DeepSeek's R1 uses clever software tweaks to offset hardware gaps. The U.S. thrives on private-sector dynamism. According to the 2025 AI Index Report from Stanford University's HAI (Human-Centered AI) Institute, 'in 2024, U.S. private AI investment grew to $109.1 billion–nearly 12 times China's $9.3 billion and 24 times the U.K.'s $4.5 billion.' This funds moonshots like GPT-4o's 130,000-word memory (imagine recalling every sentence from War and Peace). But fragmentation plagues progress. Martijn Rasser of the Center for a New American Security has written and spoken extensively about the fragmented nature of the U.S. AI ecosystem versus China's coordinated, state-driven approach: Europe prides itself in leading in AI ethics but lags in commercialization relative to the U.S. and China, much like a chef perfecting a recipe but lacking a suitable kitchen. The EU's AI Act prioritizes transparency, yet the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) indicates an average €22 billion annual R&D gap with the U.S. over the last 5 years, which significantly stifles innovation. According to Francesca Bria of Italy's National Innovation Fund: AI guzzles energy like a thirsty giant–China's data centers consumed 140 billion kWh in 2024 (Sweden's annual usage) with projections tripling by 2035. Rural coal plants power most facilities, clashing with green goals. Chip shortages compound issues: U.S. bans forced ByteDance to use slower Huawei chips, inflating training costs by 30%. Ajit Jaokar, AI Ambassador at the of the University of Oxford, states that "while constraints on hardware have forced Chinese AI labs like DeepSeek to pursue innovative engineering solutions, these efficiency gains can only go so far in offsetting fundamental hardware gaps." Tencent's largest data center and cloud computing base in East China Recent reporting from the LA Times highlights that data centers, especially those supporting AI, are dramatically increasing electricity demand and raising the risk of blackouts in California. 'California is working itself into a precarious position,' said Thomas Popik, president of the Foundation for Resilient Societies, which created GridClue to educate the public on threats posed by increasing power use. Talent shortages add pressure–72% of U.S. AI hires come from abroad, while China graduates three times as many computer scientists (more on this soon). The ECA's 2024 report provides strong evidence that the EU's digital and AI markets are fragmented due to individual national regulations, hampering the ability of startups and scale-ups to grow across borders (27 countries with differing rules). Imagine building 27 tiny bridges instead of one superhighway. Additionally, the report notes that 'the EU is losing a significant proportion of its AI talent to the United States, particularly to Silicon Valley,' with some estimates suggesting a 52% talent outflow, so Europe struggles to compete, or even keep up. Price is now the new battleground in the AI model wars. DeepSeek's R1, for example, offers API access at just $0.55 per million input tokens and $2.19 per million output tokens, making it one of the most affordable high-performance models on the market today. By comparison, OpenAI's o1 model charges $15 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens, while GPT-4o's latest pricing stands at $5 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, depending on the use case and context length. This dramatic price gap has set off a wave of competitive pricing across the sector. Baidu, for instance, recently cut the price of its Ernie 4.5 Turbo model by 20 percent, while Tencent and iFlytek have announced major reductions and even free access to lighter versions of their models, intensifying the race to make AI more accessible and affordable for businesses and developers. Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud reported a 7 percent year-on-year revenue increase in late 2024, attributing much of this growth to surging demand for AI-related products and services. The message is clear: as AI becomes more deeply embedded in the digital economy, the winners will be those who can deliver both performance and cost savings at scale. In an earlier interview with Business Insider, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated, Stanford HAI seems to back up this changing of the guard: 'In 2023, leading American models significantly outperformed their Chinese counterparts–a trend that no longer holds. By the end of 2024, these differences had narrowed substantially to just 0.3, 8.1, 1.6, and 3.7 percentage points.' USA vs China: AI Race The AI contest isn't about who crosses a finish line first–it's about who navigates an endless obstacle course with the fewest stumbles. China's rise in cost-efficient AI mirrors its solar panel dominance, but hardware constraints and energy bottlenecks loom, and while its centralized approach enables coordinated national effort, this may limit certain types of innovation. America's private-sector brilliance fuels significant breakthroughs, yet fragmentation and local talent shortages threaten its edge. Europe, meanwhile, risks becoming a regulatory ghost town-strong on ethics, weak on execution. The true victor won't be the nation with the smartest algorithms, but the one that harmonizes innovation with humanity. Imagine a future where U.S.-designed AI accelerates drug discovery for rare diseases, Chinese models democratize education in underserved regions, and Europe's safeguards prevent another Siri privacy debacle. The infrastructure race–for chips, energy, and talent–may ultimately prove more decisive than any single algorithm breakthrough. As AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li recently stated in her opening speech at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris: "We need to invest in far healthier and more vibrant AI ecosystems... Open-source communities and the public sector can all participate and play their critical role alongside big companies in driving this technology forward. If AI is going to change the world, we need everyone from all walks of life to have a role in shaping this change." Perhaps the most crucial question isn't who leads the AI race today, but who's building the foundations for tomorrow's AI landscape–both for the creative industries and for the more traditional AI-influenced sectors. This race has no clear finish line—only continual adaptation to an ever-advancing technological frontier. (Stay tuned for my next story exploring how talent flow has a huge influence)
South China Morning Post
23-04-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Flurry of Chinese AI updates come from Big Tech amid further restrictions on Nvidia chips
China's leading technology firms have been ramping up efforts to produce new artificial intelligence (AI) products, introducing multiple tools in recent days focusing on visual applications and autonomous agents. Advertisement ByteDance , With their considerable resources, Tencent Holdings Baidu and Alibaba Group Holding , which owns the Post, have been consistently rolling out upgrades to generative AI models and ready-to-use products, leaving smaller competitors to focus on niche markets. DeepSeek , China's AI wunderkind, has largely stayed focused on research breakthroughs instead of market-facing products. Tencent on Wednesday announced upgraded three-dimensional design capabilities for its Hunyuan family of models. Hunyuan3D-2.5 can generate 3D assets that 'achieve ultra-high-definition modelling of geometric details with flatter surfaces, sharper edges and more details' than previous versions, Tencent said. In a live-streamed demonstration, engineers showed the system transforming images of objects such as a truck and an ancient Chinese pagoda into high-resolution 3D files that could be used in video gaming , industrial design or 3D printing. The updated model is now accessible through the Hunyuan 3D AI Engine, which will generate 20 items per day for free, twice the previous limit. Corporate clients and developers can access the model through an application programming interface (API) for a fee. Advertisement
