Tencent has unveiled Hy4 Preview, an open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model. The release marks a significant escalation in China’s intensifying AI arms race, where the country’s biggest tech companies are racing to build ever-larger foundation models.
For context, Tencent’s previous Hy3 model clocked in at 295 billion total parameters. Think of parameters as the knobs and dials that a model can tune during training: more parameters generally means a model can learn more nuanced patterns, though how efficiently those parameters are used matters just as much.
From Hy3 to Hy4: a rapid evolution
The Hy4 Preview builds on what was already a strong foundation. Tencent’s Hy3 model, a 295B total parameter MoE architecture with 21B active parameters and a 256K context window, was open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license in April 2026 before receiving its formal release in July.
Weekly usage of Hy3 rose more than 68-fold after it transitioned from preview to formal release.
