WizardLM, a Beijing-based Microsoft AI analysis group, seems to have joined Tencent, the Chinese language firm that owns WeChat and blockbuster video games like PUBG Cell.
In a publish on X on Tuesday, Can Xu, a senior AI researcher who led numerous tasks inside WizardLM, stated that he and the crew left Microsoft to affix Hunyuan, certainly one of Tencent’s AI growth orgs. Over the previous few months, Hunyuan has launched AI fashions together with video and 3D object mills.
WizardLM has already launched a Hunyuan-branded mannequin, in truth: Hunyuan-TurboS 0416. In an X publish, Qingfeng Solar, who claims to be a “co-founder” of WizardLM, says that Hunyuan-TurboS 0416 outperforms “open” AI fashions like Google’s Gemma 3 collection.
It’s not clear what number of researchers are nonetheless part of WizardLM or when the crew may’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.
Final April, the crew, then below Microsoft, launched a household of AI fashions, WizardLM-2, that it stated was aggressive with OpenAI’s GPT-4. However after solely a day, Microsoft pulled WizardLM-2 from the online, saying that the fashions hadn’t undergone “toxicity testing.”
“We by accident 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’re presently finishing this check rapidly after which will re-release our mannequin as quickly as doable.”
The deletion got here a bit too late. Customers rapidly reuploaded the unique WizardLM-2 fashions in addition to personalized, fine-tuned variations.
In the meantime, 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 tasks.
“[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 in an effort to attempt to discover a good decision for neighborhood members.”
At Tencent, it appears WizardLM will hold doing what it was doing, roughly: creating and releasing AI fashions. Tencent just lately restructured its Hunyuan crew, establishing two new models 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 gas its AI efforts.
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