WizardLM, a Microsoft AI research group based in Beijing, has announced its transition to Tencent, the parent company of WeChat and popular games like PUBG Mobile. Can Xu, a senior AI researcher formerly with WizardLM, revealed in a recent post on X that he and his team have joined Hunyuan, one of Tencent’s AI development arms. Recently, Hunyuan has debuted AI models capable of creating videos and generating 3D objects.
The team is already making strides within Tencent, having released the Hunyuan-TurboS 0416 model, which its co-founder, Qingfeng Sun, claims outperforms existing open AI models, including Google’s Gemma 3 series. However, details about the current composition of the WizardLM team or the timeline of their departure from Microsoft remains unclear. Inquiries were made to both Tencent and Microsoft for further clarification.
WizardLM’s journey has been marked by notable events; last April, while still under Microsoft’s wing, they introduced a series of AI models, WizardLM-2, asserting their competitiveness with OpenAI’s GPT-4. However, the models were retracted within a day due to lacking toxicity testing, a critical component of the release process. The team later acknowledged this oversight, stating their intention to rectify the issue quickly.
Despite the deletion of the WizardLM-2 models, users swiftly re-uploaded them alongside various modified versions. This incident drew criticism from Hugging Face’s CEO, Clément Delangue, who noted that Microsoft’s actions disrupted numerous open-source projects within the community, as the WizardLM models had seen significant monthly downloads.
Now at Tencent, WizardLM seems set to continue its focus on AI model development. Following a recent restructuring, Tencent has enhanced its AI infrastructure and ambitions, pledging around 90 billion yuan (approximately $12.49 billion) toward these initiatives. This investment aligns with Tencent’s recent 8% year-over-year growth, which the company attributes to its focus on AI advancements.
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