Tencent Acquires Microsoft's WizardLM AI Team

Tencent Bolsters AI Development with Acquisition of Microsoft's WizardLM Team

Tencent has significantly strengthened its AI capabilities by acquiring the WizardLM AI research team from Microsoft. This team, previously based in Beijing, will now contribute to Tencent's Hunyuan AI development organization.

WizardLM, led by senior AI researcher Can Xu, has already released a Hunyuan-branded model, Hunyuan-TurboS 0416. Qingfeng Sun, reportedly a co-founder of WizardLM, claims this model outperforms open AI models like Google's Gemma 3 series.

WizardLM's History at Microsoft

WizardLM's time at Microsoft was marked by a controversial incident involving the release of the WizardLM-2 AI models. The models, initially touted as competitive with OpenAI's GPT-4, were quickly pulled offline due to a lack of toxicity testing. Despite the retraction, reuploaded versions of the models circulated online.

This removal sparked criticism from the open-source community, with Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue highlighting the disruption caused to various projects reliant on the WizardLM models.

Tencent's Growing AI Investment

The acquisition of WizardLM aligns with Tencent's increased focus on AI. The company recently restructured its Hunyuan team and has committed substantial resources to AI infrastructure. Tencent attributes its recent 8% year-over-year growth to these AI investments and plans to continue investing heavily in this area.

The move to Tencent suggests WizardLM will continue its focus on developing and releasing AI models, now under the Hunyuan brand. The integration of this experienced team is expected to further accelerate Tencent's AI advancements.