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Iris Deng

Tencent Holdings is ramping up its overseas push for its flagship Hy3 artificial intelligence model, joining a wave of Chinese technology firms taking aim at the world’s leading players.
On Wednesday, the Shenzhen-based technology giant rolled out Hy3 to global developers, enterprises and users through its workplace agentic tool WorkBuddy, creation studio Tencent Design Miora and model platform TokenHub.
According to Tencent, Hy3 would be available free of charge worldwide on WorkBuddy until August 31.
The move to broaden international access followed the official launch of the model last month.
Hy3 would enable organisations to “move beyond AI experimentation and put intelligence to work in practical, trusted and scalable ways,” said Poshu Yeung, senior vice-president of Tencent Cloud and head of the unit’s international business.
Though relatively small, Hy3 is Tencent’s most powerful model yet, with 295 billion parameters. The release has been watched closely by the industry as the first major update in Tencent’s AI strategy since former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu joined the Chinese technology giant to lead its foundational AI development efforts.
The model’s application programming interface call volume had increased more than 68-fold compared with the previous generation, and it had topped the global large language model usage leaderboard on tracking site OpenRouter in the first week of its launch, according to the company.

As of Wednesday, the model was ranked third, behind DeepSeek’s V4 Flash and Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.5.
Tencent has emphasised Hy3’s upgrades in agentic capabilities, as it pushes aggressively for the adoption of its AI productivity agents, including WorkBuddy. The company is working to gain ground in a fierce domestic competition with tech giants Alibaba Group Holding and ByteDance, as well as rapidly rising players such as DeepSeek and Zhipu AI. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
WorkBuddy was the most popular desktop workplace AI agent in June, with nearly 21 million users, ahead of ByteDance’s Trae IDE and Alibaba’s QoderWork, according to Chinese market research firm Analysys.
Tencent launched its flagship Hy model series, previously known as Hunyuan, in 2023, months after OpenAI released ChatGPT, which kicked off the generative AI boom.
However, in the past year, Hunyuan’s overall capabilities have been surpassed by its domestic rivals – including Zhipu AI’s GLM and Moonshot AI’s Kimi – triggering an internal restructuring that saw the arrival of Yao late last year to take up the mantle of chief AI scientist.
In a speech in June, Yao noted that the team had rebuilt the infrastructure in pre-training and reinforcement learning for the preview version of Hy3, and had altered data sets and model evaluation to enhance quality.


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Hy3’s release is the first major update in Tencent’s AI strategy since former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu joined the Chinese tech giant


Hy3’s release is the first major update in Tencent’s AI strategy since former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu joined the Chinese tech giant.


Tencent ramps up overseas AI push with wider roll-out of flagship Hy3 model

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Hy3’s release is the first major update in Tencent’s AI strategy since former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu joined the Chinese tech giant

Hy3’s release is the first major update in Tencent’s AI strategy since former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu joined the Chinese tech giant