[BEIJING] Tencent Holdings released new AI services that turn text or images into 3D visuals and graphics, the latest in a series of products to emerge from big tech firms since DeepSeek galvanised Chinese and US artificial intelligence development.
Tencent’s five new 3D-content generators are built atop its Hunyuan3D-2.0 model, all of which it intends to open-source to users, the company said in a statement. They will help power an upgraded version of Tencent’s proprietary 3D engine for games and other content.
From OpenAI to Alibaba Group Holding, major industry players on both sides of the Pacific have rolled out AI model advancements at an astonishing pace. The series of introductions underscore a dramatically quickened pace of development since DeepSeek stunned Silicon Valley with a model that matched the best from OpenAI and Meta Platforms – but at purportedly a sliver the cost.
That was true particularly in China, where the two-year-old startup has galvanised interest across a tech industry that for years struggled to match the US. Baidu just upgraded its flagship foundation model to Ernie 4.5. and introduced the X1, designed to compete with DeepSeek’s R1.
“Baidu’s latest AI model launches can help the struggling firm narrow the development gap with DeepSeek, Alibaba and Tencent, but they won’t drive any significant earnings upside given the fierce competition in China’s commoditized AI sector,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Robert Lea and Jasmine Lyu. “Baidu’s new native Ernie 4.5 multimodal foundation model and Ernie X1 deep-thinking reasoning model don’t appear sufficiently differentiated from the competition, and follow the launch of similar models from the other firms.”
Tencent has been playing catch-up too. Last month, the WeChat operator rolled out the Hunyuan Turbo S, which is designed to respond as instantly as possible, distinguishing itself from the deep reasoning approach of DeepSeek’s eponymous chatbot. The deployment cost has also fallen sharply, Tencent said on its official WeChat channel.
The platforms outlined on Tuesday (Mar 17) fit Tencent’s broader distribution and publishing business. Gaming studios have explored ways to use AI to speed up everything from in-game design to pre-production, potentially streamlining the time it takes to get a title to market.
Apart from in-house development, Tencent is also integrating DeepSeek’s R1 model into a wide range of its products, from WeChat search to the Yuanbao AI chatbot. Yuanbao even briefly passed DeepSeek to become the most downloaded iPhone app in China this month. BLOOMBERG
