China’s Tencent Signals ‘Hunyuan’ AI Chatbot Launch

Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings hinted at the imminent launch of its own artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot on Wednesday, as it bids to catch up with its domestic rivals in the midst of a next-gen tech race.

The Shenzhen-based company published a post on WeChat to drum up hype for a two-day summit it will kick off on Thursday. The post featured a demo conversation a user had with an AI chatbot, which helped the user write promotional materials.

The company also added a new mini-program named “HunyuanAide” to WeChat, although it remained inaccessible to the public as of Wednesday.

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Reuters reported in February that the company had formed a team to develop a ChatGPT-like chatbot named “HunyuanAide”.

This comes after China started to approve AI chatbots for public release last month. Other big tech companies in China including Baidu Inc and SenseTime Group released their AI chatbots last week.

Tencent has been developing its own AI model named “Hunyuan” for months and the company said last month that it was expanding the test of the model internally.

Tencent’s shares were down around 0.43% on Wednesday in Hong Kong while the broader market remained flat.

Reuters with additional editing by Sean O’Meara

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Sean O'Meara

Sean O'Meara is an Editor at Asia Financial. He has been a newspaper man for more than 30 years, working at local, regional and national titles in the UK as a writer, sub-editor, page designer and print editor. A football, cricket and rugby fan, he has a particular interest in sports finance.