On May 30th, Tencent announced a comprehensive upgrade of its Hunyuan LLM and launched a LLM app called Tencent Yuanbao.

Hunyuan LLM upgrade, Tencent Yuanbao App available

Tencent stated that the overall performance of its current Hunyuan LLM has improved by about 50% compared to the September 2023 version. Specifically, the parameters have been upgraded from billions to trillions, the tokens have increased from 1 trillion to 7 trillion, and the dense model has been upgraded to a mixed expert MOE model.

After the upgrade, the Hunyuan LLM has made significant improvements in aspects such as text, graphics, and video/3D.

● More accurate articles: improve the effectiveness of current and knowledge-based questions, making them more efficient than traditional searches; 256K native window context; Improve mathematical and physical abilities by 50%.

● More realistic images: upgraded infrastructure to DiT; The evaluation results are leading domestically; The first domestic Chinese DiT open-source model.

● Longer and higher resolution videos/3D: A single image only takes 30 seconds to generate a 3D model; Supports 16 second video generation; Based on the ST DiT comprehensive upgrade architecture.

Tencent also revealed that the company has over 600 business integrated into the Hunyuan LLM internally.

Tencent Yuanbao is an AI application built on the newly upgraded Hunyuan LLM. The official mentioned in the AI product introduction, "We hope to use AI capabilities to help users provide efficiency and life assistance in areas such as office, learning, creation, and daily life."

It is reported that Tencent Yuanbao provides users with AI capabilities including efficiency functions such as AI search, AI parsing, and AI writing, as well as AI avatars, oral practice, super translation, and AI applications such as travel, food, and fitness.

Competition for C-side AI products

It is worth noting that before Tencent, several Chinese companies had already launched their own AI applications and several popular ones had already appeared.

In the second half of last year, Baidu's ERNIE Bot took the lead in launching the first shot of AI applications, attracting many netizens to try new things. In March of this year, AI startup Moonshot AI announced a breakthrough in long context window technology. Its AI product kimi has exploded in the domestic AI industry due to its ability to support 2 million words of lossless context input. Recently, ByteDance's Doubao LLM has become popular with its high cost performance.

Previously, CSCI released a research report saying that the domestic AI industry was progressing rapidly. In the first quarter, we looked at emerging unicorn companies such as Kimi. In the second quarter, we should focus on the catching up and development of mature LLM platforms in C-end applications, such as Internet giants (such as ByteDance's Doubao) and mature LLM companies.

As of press release, in the ranking list of "efficiency" free apps in the Apple App Store, Doubao currently ranks first, ERNIE Bot ranks fourth, Tencent Yuanbao ranks sixth, and Kimi ranks eleventh. It is worth noting that Doubao also ranks first in the "All Apps" category (free apps).

Interestingly, Tencent doesn't seem to pay much attention to the fact that the products of its competitors have become famous and occupy the top of the rankings. Liu Yuhong, Vice President of Tencent Cloud and Head of Tencent's Hunyuan LLM, believes that this behavior of constantly scrolling through the charts is not important to users and they do not care. So Tencent doesn't pay attention or stare at those rankings.

At the press conference for Tencent Yuanbao's launch, Liu Yuhong said, "Tencent has always been the first to expand its LLMs. Over the past year, we have been continuously advancing the capabilities of Tencent's Hunyuan LLM, polishing technology in rich and massive business scenarios, and gaining insight into users' real needs. We hope that Tencent Yuanbao can become a good partner and helper in users' lives, ultimately serving the lives of every ordinary person."

As for Tencent Yuanbao's launch time lagging behind other enterprises, Liu Yuhong believes that although the industry seems hot, the number of mobile Internet users in China is 1.232 billion, and the number of active users of domestic AI head products is only millions. This means that the penetration rate of AI products is extremely low, less than 1%.

Liu Yuhong further stated that in mature industries, the first mover advantage may be very important, and a stuck position is equivalent to occupying a competitive advantage. But in the unformed market with a penetration rate of less than 1%, the first mover advantage is only a fraction of a percent, and 99% of users are not covered, making this first mover advantage insignificant.

Based on the above situation, Liu Yuhong stated that he is currently not considering the commercialization of Tencent Yuanbao.Liu Yuhong stated that Tencent Yuanbao will not directly commercialize at present, but will empower more mature products with LLMs, such as Tencent Meeting, Tencent Documents, and Tencent Advertising, to help these products achieve commercialization.

Regarding the issue of homogenization in AI applications, Liu Yuhong believes that Tencent Yuanbao has advantages in product, engineering, technology, and other aspects.

"Tencent has experience in serving a large number of users, and product capabilities have always been our advantage. Before its launch, Yuanbao had been internally polished for a long time, and its adaptability in the application field was confident. We have experience in solving many problems that may not be encountered with our products." Liu Yuhong introduced, "In terms of engineering, we also have confidence, and we have the ability to do the best at lower costs. In addition, the technical advantage of the LLM itself is that although we released relatively late, our technological evolution has always been in the first tier, and the technical ceiling will be relatively high."