Tencent unveils Hy4 as open-weight AI race with DeepSeek, Z.ai, Alibaba heats up

Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings has rolled out its latest flagship artificial intelligence model, Hy4, seeking to challenge top open-weight rivals with enhanced agentic capabilities built to power its enterprise software ecosystem.

Released on Wednesday, the large language model (LLM) introduced visual understanding for the first time. Hy4 could process images, analyse complex charts and conduct visual mathematical reasoning, according to the Shenzhen-based company.

Tencent said the release marked the first time its AI line-up became “one of the strongest open-weight models available today”, although it acknowledged that the model still trailed the world’s leading closed-source systems, particularly on challenging internal benchmarks for research-level mathematics, long-horizon coding, model self-improvement and advanced visual question answering.