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 a variety of tasks inside WizardLM, stated that he and the workforce left Microsoft to affix Hunyuan, certainly one of Tencent’s AI improvement 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, 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 collection.
It’s not clear what number of researchers are nonetheless a a part of WizardLM or when the workforce would possibly’ve left Microsoft. We’ve reached out to each Tencent and Microsoft for remark.
WizardLM, shaped a number of years in the past, has a little bit of a unusual history.
Last April, the workforce, then below 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 online, saying that the fashions hadn’t undergone “toxicity testing.”
“We accidentally missed an item required in the model release process — toxicity testing,” the WizardLM workforce wrote in a publish on X on April 16, 2024. “We are currently completing this test quickly and then will re-release our model as soon as possible.”
The deletion got here a little too late. Users shortly reuploaded the unique WizardLM-2 fashions in addition to personalized, 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 a variety of open supply tasks.
“[The WizardLM] models were collectively downloaded over a hundred thousand times a month,” Delangue wrote on the time. “We apologize for the inconvenience & are trying to get in touch with the author [and] Microsoft in order to try to find a good resolution for community members.”
At Tencent, it appears WizardLM will hold doing what it was doing, kind of: growing and releasing AI fashions. Tencent just lately restructured its Hunyuan workforce, establishing two new models and upping its AI infrastructure spending.
Tencent attributed its 8% year-over-year progress 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 yr, a lot of which is able to gasoline its AI efforts.