Tencent

Tencent is one of the largest technology companies in the world, best known outside China for WeChat and for owning or part-owning a long list of game studios. Inside China it is closer to infrastructure than to a single product: payments, messaging, cloud and entertainment all run through it.

In AI, Tencent develops the Hunyuan model family, and it has taken the same route as several other Chinese labs by publishing the weights rather than keeping them behind an API. Its models are aimed less at benchmark records and more at office and engineering work, and they ship alongside Tencent’s own tools such as CodeBuddy and WorkBuddy. For anyone outside China, the practical effect is competitive pressure: every capable model that is free to self-host pushes down what the closed labs can charge.