Tencent says its foundation model outperforms rivals in internal tests

The claim is particularly interesting because Tencent is also an investor in Moonshot AI. Funding your competitor and then trying to beat them is the kind of strategic tension that keeps corporate strategy consultants employed. The players and their models Tencent has been building out its Hunyuan model series, with the Hy3 (Hunyuan 3.0) release arriving in mid-2026. That model features 295 billion parameters and has been designed with a specific focus: deep integration into Tencent’s sprawling ecosystem of services, including WeChat and its AI assistant Yuanbao. On the other side of this rivalry sits Moonshot AI, a company founded just in 2023. Moonshot launched its Kimi K3 model on July 17, 2026, and the specs are hard to ignore: 2.8 trillion parameters, support for 1 million active tokens via its mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, and competitive results against leading US models. Moonshot released open weights for Kimi K3 on July 27, 2026, roughly ten days after the initial launch. The awkward investor dynamic Moonshot AI counts both Alibaba and Tencent among its major backers. The company is reportedly raising $2 billion at a valuation of approximately $30 billion, with pl...