Tencent Open-Sources Hy4 Preview, Its Latest AI Model

Tencent Releases and Open-Sources Tencent Hy4 Preview

Tencent Open-Sources Hy4 Preview, Its Latest AI Model

Tencent has released and open-sourced the preview of Hy4, its latest AI model. The announcement, made on May 17, 2024, highlights Tencent's commitment to advancing AI technology and fostering community collaboration. Hy4 preview is now available for developers and researchers to explore, marking a significant step in Tencent's AI strategy.

  1. jamienk

    Genuine Q about word optimization/token density:

    If we create a stripped-down vocabulary with greater token density to use less resources and to resolve ambiguities earlier in the semantic process, aren't we creating NEWSPEAK and dragging along the worst aspects of it? The ambiguity and multi-valence of words is what creates more connections between words, increases the directionality of associations, and expands the potential subtlety and depth of meaning. By paring down (or requiring verifiability) we make it harder to say certain things, or at least make it harder to unintentionally say something that makes MORE or DEEPER sense than what we intended. If the token density becomes extreme, you're left with something like a calculator.

    Maybe this is the ultimate path toward better coding? But the worse path toward better genuine thinking?

  2. simonw

    > [...] Let's maybe add a helmet? It could improve riding theme, but may obscure head. Maybe a small cycling cap or helmet? The user didn't ask; can add red helmet? Might be cute. But pelican with big beak; a helmet might obscure. Better maybe no.

    > Maybe add sunglasses? no.

    > Maybe add water? no.

    https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...

  3. codethief

    > Notably, Hy4 preview also contributed to its own development process, participating for the first time in the automated optimization of training methods, data strategies, evaluation frameworks, and low-level operators. The model proposed approaches, ran experiments, and iterated based on the results, with the resulting code, logs, and feedback feeding into subsequent rounds of exploration. This established an early-stage recursive self-improvement loop.

    This reminds me of one of the predictions from https://ai-2027.com/ . Only that there it's "OpenBrain" doing this, not the Chinese. And the authors of that paper were also slightly wrong about "Mid 2026: China Wakes Up": China woke up already a while ago. And:

    > But China is falling behind on AI algorithms due to their weaker models. The Chinese intelligence agencies—among the best in the world—double down on their plans to steal OpenBrain’s weights.

    No need to steal anything, they have already caught up.

    And then there's this prediction for February 2027:

    > Officials are most interested in its cyberwarfare capabilities: Agent-2 is “only” a little worse than the best human hackers

    I think we're past that point now, too…

  4. minimaxir

    Hy4 apparently has ludicrous traction on OpenRouter already (https://openrouter.ai/tencent/hy4-preview), with trillions of tokens processed in a couple days: more than GLM 5.3 in a week. That said, it's relatively cheap with a 5% cache cost when everyone is still doing 10%/20% cache costs, so Hy4 may be more compelling.

  5. fastball

    I wish model providers would stop committing chart crimes in their releases.

    - if you're gonna order the rest of the bar chart by rank, order your model accordingly.

    - if you're gonna highlight a winner in a table of benchmarks, don't highlight your entire model row in the table.

    Etc etc

  6. jorl17

    I experimented with Hy3 for a project and was surprised with how good it was. I don't know if it's good for coding, but as a general purpose agentic model, it was only beaten by deepseek4-flash in our tests. It was so close to deepseek behaviour I kept thinking it must have been forked from it.

  7. Zigurd

    Is anyone here working on a problem for which current generation LLMs are inadequate, but that could possibly be solved by the next release of a first tier LLM?

    Or is it like bicycles? Unless your problem is named Tadej, you don't need a $13,000 bike.

  8. joshheitzman

    Maybe's its a problem with the hosting at novita.ai but I didn't got much useful out of this model as a coding agent.

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