China’s Tencent has released its new flagship model called “Hy3-preview,” the company’s first after OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu joined to lead its AI efforts.

The Shenzhen-based tech giant said that the new model was its most powerful yet, on par with Chinese rivals such as DeepSeek, but still lagging behind the flagship products of US counterparts from companies like OpenAI and Google.

Hy3-preview is more powerful than Tencent’s previous flagship model, the HY 2.0 released late last year, despite being smaller: it has 295 billion parameters compared to previous version’s more than 400 billion.

Parameters are mathematical variables encoding a model’s intelligence and are roughly proportional to the amount of computational power needed to train and serve it.

Tencent said that the new model was developed to cater for real-world business scenarios and was already being deployed across the company’s AI products, including consumer app Yuanbao and coding assistant CodeBuddy, according to the South China Morning Post.

The company said that agentic capabilities were “one of the most significantly improved areas in this release.”

This includes compatibility with OpenClaw, an agentic AI tool created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger that has gained extreme popularity in China, with Tencent one of the most enthusiastic adopters.

Hy3-preview is open-source and available online for free, including on a Hugging Face repository.

Playing catch-up

It is the first model released by Tencent since former OpenAI researcher Yao was made the company’s chief AI scientist in December.

While Tencent released its flagship Hunyuan chatbot in 2023, just months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, it was overtaken last year by more advanced rivals in China, including Zhipu AI’s GLM and Moonshot AI’s Kimi.

By bringing Yao on board, Tencent sought to restructure its AI efforts, as other legacy companies in China made similar moves amid intensifying race to unlock the next stage of AI development, the so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

After joining Tencent, Yao said there was a “high likelihood” of a Chinese firm becoming the world’s leading AI company in the next three to five years, provided the country ramps up its chipmaking capabilities.

"Currently, we have a significant advantage in electricity and infrastructure. The main bottlenecks are production capacity, including lithography machines, and the software ecosystem," Yao said at the time.

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