Who's who · Chinese labs
Tencent Hunyuan
Tencent's foundation model team, maker of the Hunyuan (Hy) models behind the Yuanbao assistant.
At a glance
- Founded
- 2023
- Based in
- Shenzhen, China
- People
- Yao Shunyu, Chief AI scientist, head of foundation models
- Known for
- Hy4 preview, Hunyuan Hy3, Yuanbao
- Licence
- Apache 2.0 (Hy4 preview)
- Funding
- Part of Tencent Holdings (Public: HKEX 0700)
- Parent
- Tencent Holdings
- Website
- https://hunyuan.tencent.com
Tencent Hunyuan is the family of AI models built by Tencent, the Shenzhen company behind WeChat, and the team that develops them. The models power Tencent's Yuanbao assistant and features across its products, and are sold to businesses through Tencent Cloud. Recent models are branded Hy.
Tencent has released many models as open weights, including video generation and language models. Hunyuan Hy3, a mixture-of-experts model (one that uses only part of its parameters for each task) with 295 billion parameters, 21 billion of them active, launched in its final form on 6 July 2026 and was added to Yuanbao straight away. On 28 August 2026 Tencent published the Hy4 preview under Apache 2.0. It has 770 billion parameters, 49 billion of them active, and a context window of about one million tokens.
In December 2025 Tencent appointed Yao Shunyu as chief AI scientist. In March 2026 it dissolved its AI Lab and moved some staff to the Hunyuan team under him, and in July it merged its language and multimodal teams into a single foundation model department that he leads.
Sources
- Tencent (Hugging Face), tencent/Hy4-preview, 2026-08-28
- TechNode, Tencent open-sources Hy4 preview with 770B parameters and a 1M-token context, 2026-08-28
- Caixin Global, Tencent Folds Multimodal, LLM Teams Into New AI Unit, 2026-07-24
- Caixin Global, Tencent Launches Final Hunyuan 3 Model With Free AI-Agent Feature, 2026-07-06
Facts last checked 2026-10-02