Tencent Holdings has introduced its new artificial intelligence (AI) reasoning model, Hunyan T1, designed to compete with DeepSeek’s R1 in performance and affordability.
The company unveiled the model on Friday, noting that it uses large-scale reinforcement learning, the same technique adopted by the DeepSeek R1 model that launched in January.
Tencent releases AI model with strong performance across benchmarks
The official release is coming after a beta test of the T1 preview on Tencent’s chatbot, Yuanbao. The model had 87.2 points on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) Pro benchmark, surpassing DeepSeek-R1’s 84 points but falling short of OpenAI’s o1, which achieved 89.3. The Tencent model also rivals DeepSeek in pricing, which is a primary advantage for the popular Chinese start-up. T1 charges 1 yuan ($0.14) per 1 million tokens of input, while output costs 4 yuan per million tokens.
According to a former JD.com expert wrote the tech blog NCJRYDS and tested T1 and R1 on the same tasks. The individual then asked other large language models, including Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to judge the results. Tencent’s model lost the duel in writing an ancient Chinese poem but beat DeepSeek in interpreting a Chinese word in different contexts.
Tencent, which operates China’s biggest social media app, WeChat, and the world’s largest video gaming business by revenue, is positioning AI as a new core revenue stream. Tencent chairman and CEO Pony Ma Huateng recently noted that he had great respect for DeepSeek for making “an independent, truly open-source and free product”.
Ma said Tencent has adopted a “double-core” strategy on AI that uses both DeepSeek and its own Yuanbao models. This approach is similar to how it has dominated the video gaming industry by promoting self-developed titles and those from independent studios.