Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Tencent, newest first.
Tencent's Hunyuan team released Hy-SimulMT, a model that listens to Chinese or English speech and translates it into the other language while the speaker is still talking, producing text and speech in a cloned version of the speaker's voice. The weights are on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license, with no limits on commercial use or region, though the spoken output needs a separate text-to-speech service. On one long-form benchmark, Tencent says the model lagged the speaker by about three seconds, the shortest of the systems it compared, and beat four of five commercial services on quality. It also tested the model against six professional interpreters on 18 recent recordings and calls the results comparable, while noting the test was small.
Tencent released Hy4 preview, a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model with 770 billion total parameters, 49 billion active per token, and a context window past one million tokens. The license is the news. The LICENSE file in the Hugging Face repository is plain Apache 2.0, with no territorial carve-out and no user threshold. Earlier Hunyuan releases ran under a community license that excluded the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea outright — terms that Tencent's HunyuanOCR model, updated the same day, still carries. Tencent reports Hy4 edging GLM-5.3 and Kimi K3 in an internal expert evaluation, a vendor-run test.
Junyang Lin, who led Alibaba's open-source Qwen models before leaving in March, has raised several hundred million dollars at a $2 billion post-money valuation for a new lab focused on world models and embodied AI, according to The Information. Tencent is among the backers. The valuation is striking for a Chinese startup with no product yet — a sign of how fiercely investors are chasing top model-building talent.
Enflame, a Shanghai designer of AI training and inference chips, has won approval for an initial public offering on the STAR Market, where it plans to raise about 6 billion yuan — roughly $888 million — to fund future chip generations. Tencent owns about 20 percent of Enflame and supplies the bulk of its revenue, making the listing a test of how far Chinese buyers will bankroll a homegrown answer to NVIDIA, which still holds around 70 percent of the domestic market. Enflame is the last of China's 'four little dragons' of AI chips to head public.
DeepSeek is close to sealing its first-ever outside funding round — about $7.4 billion, or 50 billion yuan — in one of China's largest startup financings. Tencent and battery maker CATL are the biggest external backers, alongside the state-backed National AI Industry Investment Fund and founder Liang Wenfeng, who is committing roughly $3 billion himself. The deal would value China's open-weights champion at $52 to $59 billion and signals Beijing's resolve to keep pace with the US capital surge.
China's DeepSeek is advancing a 70 billion yuan (about $10 billion) financing round at a pre-money valuation near $45 billion, Bloomberg reported Friday — the first time the lab has accepted outside capital after being self-funded by founder Liang Wenfeng's High-Flyer quant fund. The likely investor list includes Beijing's National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, Tencent, IDG Capital, and Monolith Capital, with the state-backed fund expected to contribute about 10 billion yuan. Liang told prospective investors the lab will keep developing **open-source models** and pursue artificial general intelligence rather than chase near-term commercialization, marking one of the largest state-aligned bets on AGI to date outside the US.