Tencent debuts ChatGPT rival - TechCentral

A Tencent building in Shenzhen, China. David Kirton/Reuters

Tencent Holdings said companies can now use its large language artificial intelligence (AI) model, called Hunyuan, as it premiered the much-awaited product on Thursday amid a race by tech firms race to become China’s AI champion.

The Chinese tech giant and owner of the WeChat social media platform conducted a demonstration before a live audience at a conference in Shenzhen, and said Hunyuan has become the foundation of more than 50 of its products and services.

“By July, there are more than 130 large language models in China,” said Tencent vice president Jiang Jie. “A war of a hundred models has begun.”

By July, there are more than 130 large language models in China. A war of a hundred models has begun

Hunyuan’s debut comes after several Chinese tech firms including Baidu and SenseTime Group recently unveiled their own AI models.

Tencent, China’s most valuable internet company, said Hunyuan had more than 100 billion parameters and was trained with more than two trillion tokens, two metrics often used to measure AI models’ power.

OpenAI’s GPT-3 AI model contained 175 billion parameters in 2020 and Meta Platform’ Llama 2 model had 70 billion parameters in 2023.

Tencent said its model, capable of conversing in both Chinese and English, is “better” than OpenAI’s ChatGPT in areas such as writing long text with thousands of words and solving certain maths problems.

‘Less hallucination’

The model also experiences 30% less hallucination compared to Llama 2, Tencent added. AI experts often describe moments where AI models generate incorrect information but present it as if it was a fact as “hallucination”.