According to Cointelegraph, Chinese technology corporation Tencent has introduced its 'Hunyuan' artificial intelligence (AI) system, a multimodal large language model (LLM) similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, at the Global Digital Ecosystem Summit in Shenzhen on August 7. Hunyuan marks Tencent's entry into foundational models, which serve as a framework for associated AI APIs to run on. The AI system is designed to function as a comprehensive suite of AI tools, supporting a wide array of functions such as image creation, copywriting, text recognition, and customer service, among others. These tools are expected to be instrumental in key industries like finance, public services, social media, e-commerce, transportation, games, and many more.

Hunyuan has also been integrated into Tencent's ecosystem of applications and services, with connectivity to Tencent Cloud, Tencent Marketing Solutions, Tencent Games, Tencent fintech services, Tencent Meeting, Tencent Docs, Weixin Search, and QQ Browser. The launch comes amid ongoing tensions between the U.S. and China, following the Biden administration's export ban on certain types of computer chips, including hardware commonly used to develop and train AI systems, in October 2022. Despite ongoing diplomatic talks, the two administrations have not yet established a timeline for ending the ban.

Tencent claims that the launch of Hunyuan demonstrates its commitment to open collaboration in the ecosystem, with domestic businesses benefiting from the company's high-quality model services, while international businesses leverage Tencent to access the Chinese market. Although Hunyuan is not the first LLM launched in the Chinese market, it may be the most significant, given Tencent's status as China's largest technology company and the potential for Hunyuan to permeate the domestic market through the ubiquity of WeChat and its associated apps. With 100-billion parameters and two-trillion tokens, Hunyuan is considered one of the most powerful LLMs in the world, although parameter and token counts are not necessarily indicative of a multimodal AI system's capabilities. However, Hunyuan's training on a massive corpus of Chinese language text could give it an advantage over models trained primarily on non-Chinese texts in the Chinese language environment.