Tencent is about to start the "AI era for all"

Yuanbao press conference scene. Tencent Cloud Vice President, Tencent Mixed Element Model Leader Liu Yuhong

Author | Huang Yu

Editor | Zhou Zhiyu

After much anticipation, Tencent, which firmly holds the top spot in domestic social traffic, has finally extended its reach to the independent AIGC APP. The battlefield has long been turbulent, but no winner has emerged yet.

On May 30th, Tencent announced the official launch of the app "Tencent Yuanbao" based on the Mixed Element Model. Previously, Tencent had created the Mixed Assistant for the consumer end, but it was only available on mini-programs and PC, Yuanbao is the first AIGC pure application created by Tencent for consumers.

Liu Yuhong, Vice President of Tencent Cloud and leader of the Tencent Mixed Element Model, stated that Tencent's focus on large models is not just for the moment.

Although the large model battlefield is intense, the penetration rate of AIGC products is very low, less than 1%, and the industry is still in its early stages.

According to QuestMobile statistics, as of March 2024, the number of users in the AIGC APP industry has just exceeded 73.8 million. The top three applications are Dou Bao under Douyin, Wenxin Yiyi under Baidu, and Tiangong under Kunlun Wanwei, with monthly active users of 23.282 million, 14.661 million, and 9.661 million respectively.

Liu Yuhong pointed out that while the first-mover advantage of ToC AIGC products is important, the premise is that the product is relatively mature and can successfully seize a position. However, considering the current penetration rate of less than 1%, this first-mover advantage seems somewhat insignificant.

Similar to pushing the Mixed Element Model to the forefront only in September last year, Tencent is also very cautious in releasing AIGC APP, polishing the technology in Tencent's massive business scenarios and deciding to launch only after gaining insights into real user needs from a large number of users.

As a latecomer, Tencent hopes that Yuanbao can become an "all-around AI assistant" in everyone's pocket.

In terms of work efficiency scenarios, Tencent Yuanbao provides core capabilities such as AI search, AI summarization, and AI writing. In daily life scenarios, Yuanbao offers a variety of rich gameplay, including various AI applications such as versatile AI avatars, spoken language practice, and super translator. It also introduces new gameplay such as creating personal intelligent entities.

Currently, large model applications are still in a very early stage, with significant "time delays" from model capabilities to application implementation. Tencent's data shows that over 65% of people's demand for large model-related products is concentrated in work/study efficiency scenarios, but the related AI product solutions are not yet mature.

Addressing the three core demands for efficiency scenarios: information acquisition, processing, and production, Tencent Yuanbao has focused on product exploration.

In terms of AI search, Tencent Yuanbao integrates WeChat Search and Sogou Search and enhances AI search to improve the effectiveness of timely and knowledge-based questions, making it more efficient than traditional search engines At the same time, the content covers WeChat official accounts and other Tencent ecosystem content as well as authoritative internet sources, resulting in higher accuracy of answers.

From the perspective of AI search capabilities, Yuanbao also acts as a connector, linking all of Tencent's internal ecosystems, including WeChat official accounts, WeCom, and more.

Liu Yuhong revealed that AI search is a distinctive and well-done aspect of Yuanbao, and enhancing the AI search capabilities is currently a key focus of the Yuan team.

In terms of AI summarization, Yuanbao can upload up to 10 documents in various formats such as PDF, Word, TXT, and can parse multiple WeChat official account links and URLs at once, supporting a native window context of 256K, equivalent to "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" or the complete original English version of "Harry Potter."

With this capability, whether you want to quickly understand a book or a new field, or deal with complex and lengthy reports and documents, Yuanbao can be of assistance.

In terms of AI writing, Yuanbao not only supports multi-round Q&A, but can also organize the content of conversations into reports, and provide structured output as required, greatly improving the efficiency from information acquisition to processing and production.

In terms of functionality, Tencent's Yuanbao does not seem to have significant differences from existing AIGC applications on the market. The real determinant of its product competitiveness lies in the underlying large model capabilities.

Since its first appearance in September 2023, the parameter scale of Tencent's Yuan large model has been upgraded from billions to trillions, the pre-training corpus has been upgraded from billions to 70 trillion tokens, and it has been the first to upgrade to a Multi-Expert Model (MoE) structure, with an overall performance improvement of over 50% compared to the Dense version.

It is reported that part of the Chinese capabilities of the Yuan large model have caught up with GPT-4, and there have also been improvements in mathematical, reasoning, and other abilities in answering "fresh" questions.

In terms of multimodal capabilities, Tencent's Yuan large model has also been enhanced. For example, in the field of generative images, Tencent's Yuan text-image generation infrastructure has been fully upgraded to the DiT architecture similar to Sora; in the field of generative videos, Tencent's Yuan supports text-image video, image-image video, text-image-video, and video-video generation capabilities, with video generation lengths of up to 16 seconds.

As AI large model underlying technologies continue to iterate, with the background of unclear commercialization paths for the consumer market, Tencent has chosen a more practical path, first serving its own business, then opening up large model capabilities to the industry through Tencent Cloud, while slowing down in the consumer market. Currently, the drive of AI for Tencent's own business has been reflected.

For Tencent, the reason why Tencent has now put consumer applications on the table is also because the entire industry has high expectations for killer applications, as this can truly bring a second growth curve to a company, and perhaps by mastering new massive traffic entry points, Tencent cannot afford to be absent.

QuestMobile points out that from the market performance perspective, users have shown great enthusiasm for AIGC, with a continuous growth in demand for related independent apps. By March this year, the user base of AIGC apps in the industry had grown by more than 8 times year-on-year The industry is booming, but there is currently no truly phenomenal AIGC application emerging, nor has any application captured the minds of users. Tencent, which has a massive user base, still seems to have a chance to come from behind and create a success story