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 Cellular.
In a put up on X on Tuesday, Can Xu, a senior AI researcher who led numerous initiatives inside WizardLM, mentioned that he and the staff left Microsoft to affix 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, actually: Hunyuan-TurboS 0416. In an X put up, 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 staff 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 wierd historical past.
Final April, the staff, then below Microsoft, launched a household of AI fashions, WizardLM-2, that it mentioned 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 unintentionally missed an merchandise required within the mannequin launch course of — toxicity testing,” the WizardLM staff wrote in a put up on X on April 16, 2024. “We’re at present finishing this check shortly after which will re-release our mannequin as quickly as potential.”
The deletion got here just a little too late. Customers shortly reuploaded the unique WizardLM-2 fashions in addition to personalized, fine-tuned variations.
In the meantime, in a put up on the AI dev platform Hugging Face, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue mentioned 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 had 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 creator [and] Microsoft with a purpose to attempt to discover a good decision for neighborhood members.”
At Tencent, it appears WizardLM will maintain doing what it was doing, kind of: creating and releasing AI fashions. Tencent just lately restructured its Hunyuan staff, 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 mentioned 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.
