As of today, Tencent has officially welcomed the WizardLM team as new members. This Beijing-based artificial intelligence research group, formerly part of Microsoft, has a storied past in AI development. In that light, this acquisition represents a daring leap ahead from Tencent. It bolsters their AI power as they face off in a brutal, dog-eat-dog tech industry.
WizardLM had started a couple years before. It quickly became a household name, not just for producing robust AI models but particularly for WizardLM-2 which released last April. The model has already received widespread recognition for how competitive it is against the most popular players in the market, including OpenAI’s GPT-4. Despite all this progress and the exciting work ahead, the team’s trip has not been without challenges.
In a recent incident, Microsoft removed WizardLM-2 from the web due to a critical oversight. The models had not undergone required toxicity testing prior to their release. The WizardLM team acknowledged this lapse, stating, “We accidentally missed an item required in the model release process — toxicity testing.” They lost this round, but they are rapidly developing the toxicity testing needed. They hope to publish an updated version of their model as soon as possible.
These problems aside, WizardLM has already ushered in some notable AI successes. The team recently released a new model, Hunyuan-TurboS 0416. It’s claimed to be way better than other “open” AI models, like the Gemma 3 series from Google.
The promise of WizardLM’s models is clear. In the case that Clément Delangue told me about three years ago, they were downloaded more than a hundred thousand a month! This immense popularity further highlights the need for cutting-edge AI solutions in today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape.
So WizardLM is now going the same route, switching over to Tencent. This shift comes as part of Tencent’s overall restructuring of its Hunyuan team, which has spun off two new units and increased its investment in AI infrastructure. According to his personal website and LinkedIn Xu, the leader of the WizardLM team, has joined one of Tencent’s AI development arms. This acquisition adds to the company’s deep commitment to globalizing its powerful AI technologies.
Qingfeng Sun, a pseudonymous co-founder of WizardLM, considers joining Tencent an exhilarating opportunity for development. He, for one, hopes it will unleash creativity and innovation in foundational AI research.