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 publish on X on Tuesday, Can Xu, a senior AI researcher who led a variety of initiatives inside WizardLM, stated that he and the staff 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 turbines.
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 sequence.
It’s not clear what number of researchers are nonetheless part of WizardLM or when the staff may’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 an odd historical past.
Final April, the staff, 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 staff wrote in a publish on X on April 16, 2024. “We’re at the moment finishing this check rapidly after which will re-release our mannequin as quickly as attainable.”
The deletion got here a little bit too late. Customers rapidly reuploaded the unique WizardLM-2 fashions in addition to custom-made, 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 a variety of open supply initiatives.
“[The WizardLM] fashions had been collectively downloaded over 100 thousand instances a month,” Delangue wrote on the time. “We apologize for the inconvenience & are attempting to get in contact with the creator [and] Microsoft with the intention to attempt to discover a good decision for neighborhood members.”
At Tencent, it appears WizardLM will preserve 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 stated that it plans to place 90 billion yuan, or round $12.49 billion, towards capital expenditures this yr, a lot of which can gas its AI efforts.
