Tencent Releases HY3-Preview AI Model, its First Flagship Since New AI Lead Yao Shunyu Joined
Tencent's new AI model, HY3-Preview, is smaller but smarter, with agentic focus.
Tencent Holdings has unveiled its latest flagship AI model, HY3-Preview, marking the first major release since former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu took the helm of the company's foundational AI efforts. The Shenzhen-based tech giant announced the open-source model on Thursday, positioning it as its most powerful AI to date, though still trailing US leaders like OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
Notably, HY3-Preview is a relatively compact model with only 295 billion parameters, a deliberate departure from the industry trend toward trillion-parameter behemoths. This is a significant reduction from Tencent's previous flagship, HY 2.0, which had over 400 billion parameters. The company emphasized that HY3-Preview was designed to bridge the gap between model capability and real-world business value, with a strong focus on agentic capabilities—enabling the AI to autonomously perform tasks. It is already deployed in Tencent's consumer app Yuanbao and coding assistant CodeBuddy.
- Tencent's HY3-Preview has 295 billion parameters, down from 400B in the prior model, bucking the trend toward trillion-parameter models.
- The model is the first flagship release under Yao Shunyu, a former OpenAI researcher who now leads Tencent's foundational AI development.
- HY3-Preview prioritizes agentic capabilities for real-world business use and is already integrated into Tencent's Yuanbao app and CodeBuddy assistant.
Why It Matters
Tencent's focus on smaller, agentic AI models signals a shift toward practical, business-ready AI over raw parameter count.