WizardLM, a Beijing-based Microsoft AI analysis group, seems to have joined Tencent, the Chinese firm that owns WeChat and blockbuster video games like PUBG Mobile.
In a publish on X on Tuesday, Can Xu, a senior AI researcher who led numerous initiatives inside WizardLM, stated that he and the crew left Microsoft to hitch Hunyuan, one in all Tencent’s AI growth orgs. Over the previous few months, Hunyuan has launched AI fashions together with video and 3D object turbines.
WizardLM has already launched a Hunyuan-branded mannequin, the truth is: Hunyuan-TurboS 0416. In an X publish, Qingfeng Sun, who claims to be a “co-founder” of WizardLM, says that Hunyuan-TurboS 0416 outperforms “open” AI fashions like Google’s Gemma 3 sequence.
It’s not clear what number of researchers are nonetheless part of WizardLM or when the crew would possibly’ve left Microsoft. We’ve reached out to each Tencent and Microsoft for remark.
WizardLM, fashioned a number of years in the past, has a little bit of an odd historical past.
Last April, the crew, then beneath Microsoft, launched a household of AI fashions, WizardLM-2, that it stated was aggressive with OpenAI’s GPT-4. But after solely a day, Microsoft pulled WizardLM-2 from the net, saying that the fashions hadn’t undergone “toxicity testing.”
“We unintentionally missed an merchandise required within the mannequin launch course of — toxicity testing,” the WizardLM crew wrote in a publish on X on April 16, 2024. “We are at present finishing this take a look at shortly after which will re-release our mannequin as quickly as potential.”
The deletion got here slightly too late. Users shortly reuploaded the unique WizardLM-2 fashions in addition to custom-made, fine-tuned variations.
Meanwhile, in a publish on the AI dev platform Hugging Face, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue stated that Microsoft’s transfer, which additionally worn out different WizardLM fashions, harmed the Hugging Face neighborhood by breaking numerous open supply initiatives.
“[The WizardLM] fashions have been collectively downloaded over 100 thousand occasions a month,” Delangue wrote on the time. “We apologize for the inconvenience & try to get in contact with the writer [and] Microsoft to be able to attempt to discover a good decision for neighborhood members.”
At Tencent, it appears WizardLM will preserve doing what it was doing, kind of: creating and releasing AI fashions. Tencent not too long ago restructured its Hunyuan crew, establishing two new items and upping its AI infrastructure spending.
Tencent attributed its 8% year-over-year development in Q1 2025 to the corporate’s AI investments. Tencent has stated that it plans to place 90 billion yuan, or round $12.49 billion, towards capital expenditures this 12 months, a lot of which can gasoline its AI efforts.
