More than 4,000 technology-focused individuals from business, academia and the media are gathering in Shenzhen in early September for the Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit (DES). The annual flagship event, now in its fifth year, showcases Tencent’s latest advances in technology coupled with its newest products and solutions. It is also a forum for attendees to hear from the experts and take part in conversations on the opportunities and challenges in the digital transformation of industries and enterprises.

Hunyuan Debut – Large-scale AI Model for Industry

Generative AI captured the world’s imagination throughout 2023 and carried through to be a hot topic at this year’s summit. Tencent has been firing up all engines and pouring investment into building its own AI capabilities and DES provides the perfect backdrop for the company to officially launch its wholly self-developed, proprietary large-scale AI model named Hunyuan. The Chinese term hunyuan denotes the origin of all things, something that is all encompassing and without limit. Use of the term reflects Tencent’s aim to create a powerful and versatile AI model for the widest of applications.

Featuring strong capabilities in Chinese language processing, advanced logical reasoning, and reliable task execution, Hunyuan was developed specifically for business and industry as a key differentiating factor.

“Different businesses have different needs. In developing chatbots and other AI services, they have to incorporate their own data to train the model so that the answers generated reflect accurate knowledge of their business offerings. As such, a general-purpose AI model may not be able to meet the specific needs of the business community,” explains Dowson Tong, Senior Executive Vice-President of Tencent and CEO of the company’s Cloud & Smart Industries Group.

“Tencent’s To-Business approach balances the exciting performance of consumer-facing, large-model AI-powered chatbots, with the pragmatic need of businesses to increase operational efficiencies, reduce cost, and, most importantly, protect privacy and proprietary data.”

MaaS – Making AI Accessible to All

Committed to open collaboration in the ecosystem and promoting industry-specific solutions to support the continued development of AI, Tencent is empowering businesses of all shapes and sizes to tap into AI technology by making Hunyuan available openly through the new Tencent Cloud Model-as-a-Service.

Tools are available at three levels with Tencent Cloud providing end-to-end support.

• The scale and sophistication of Tencent Cloud’s infrastructure and computing power enable clients to obtain Hunyuan from Tencent’s public cloud platform, finetune and train their own uniquely intelligent service models in a secure environment after incorporating their specific, proprietary data.
• Companies looking for just simple plug and play solutions may choose from more than 50 large-scale models that have been specifically pre-trained and optimized for 20 major industries such as finance, cultural tourism, public services, media, education and more.
• Ten proprietary applications including Tencent Meeting, Tencent Docs and WeCom/WeChat are fully AI-enabled to improve user experiences. Leveraging Hunyuan’s natural language processing powers, the applications can provide smart services such as creating meeting summaries and pinpointing information providers to facilitate follow-up questions or actions.
  

Tencent Cloud – Serving at Home and Internationally

Other than AI, DES provides attendees with insights into Tencent and Tencent Cloud’s international capabilities which support Chinese enterprises to grow in overseas markets while facilitating overseas companies to expand into China with a one-stop China Connect solution.

The global cloud computing market remains a bright spot. Operating data center facilities in 26 geographic areas on five continents with 70 availability zones, Tencent Cloud posted double digit revenue growth in the first half of 2023.  Asia continues to be the most important market, but healthy activity is being recorded in Latin America and the Middle East. With over 11,000 partners worldwide, Tencent Cloud’s Global Partner Ecosystem is a key driving force for its international business. Partner-driven revenue has grown 66 percent year-over-year as of mid-2023.

Supporting Digital Transformation of Industry, Serving People and Society

“Tencent’s innovations are underpinned by the principle that technology serves industry, people, and society effectively. We will continue to collaborate with our partners to support the digital transformation of businesses while harnessing the power of AI to enable businesses to unleash the potential of their data, driving industry innovation to improve people’s quality of life,” Dowson concludes.