Facing scrutiny and persistent questions over its track record in artificial intelligence, Tencent Holdings’ co-founder and CEO Pony Ma Huateng offered this candid assessment to shareholders on Wednesday: “A year ago we thought we were on the boat, then we found it was leaking.”
Speaking at the firm’s annual general meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong, Ma signalled the beginnings of a turnaround, saying that the company had finally found its footing but was “not yet seated”, according to a report by Chinese media outlet National Business Daily.
“We hope the ship can go a bit faster,” he was quoted as saying ahead of first quarter earnings that missed estimates amid a slowdown in gaming sales growth.
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A major AI milestone for the company this year was the launch of “Hy3 preview”, Tencent’s first flagship model since former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu joined the Shenzhen-based tech giant to lead its foundational AI development efforts.
Since its launch in April, Hy3 preview, a relatively small model with only 295 billion parameters, quickly rose to the top of the leaderboard of OpenRouter, an AI hosting platform, in terms of token usage.
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Tencent “completely overhauled” its foundational model with the new team, and re-engineered the system and process for pre-training and reinforced learning from the ground up, Tencent president Martin Lau Chi-ping said on the earnings call on Wednesday.