Tencent has released Hy4, the latest generation of its Hunyuan AI model family. Announced on November 4, 2026, Hy4 is the full version of the model Tencent previewed in August — and this time it can do two things its predecessors could not: see images properly, and operate a computer on its own.
What's Actually New
For the first time in the Hunyuan line, Hy4 has real visual understanding: fine-grained image processing, complex chart analysis, and mathematical visual reasoning, according to Tencent. It also gains computer-use capabilities, letting it interact with command-line interfaces and graphical interfaces to carry out work and everyday tasks. Tencent says it gave the model specialized training on professional software such as Blender and CAD, aimed at long, multi-step jobs like 3D scene building and web development.
Scale, Access, and Pricing
Hy4 is a 770-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model (49 billion active parameters) with a 1-million-token context window. It is available now through Tencent's own products — Yuanbao, WorkBuddy, CodeBuddy, ima, and the WeCom assistant Dayuan — plus Tencent Cloud's TokenHub and third-party APIs including OpenRouter. Pricing is unchanged from the preview: about $0.90 per million input tokens and $2.70 per million output tokens. WorkBuddy and CodeBuddy are free from November 4 to 15, and TokenHub carries a 50% discount through December 31, 2026. A lighter, cheaper Hy4 Flash is coming soon, with no date announced yet.
The Safety Angle — and the Catch
Tencent is pitching Hy4's restraint as a feature: the model was trained on defensive cybersecurity data only, with offensive material such as exploit development and penetration testing filtered out of training, a move Reuters highlighted as Chinese AI firms join US companies in limiting cyber-offensive capability. Tencent's Xuanwu Lab and Keen Security Lab assessed the model and reported no significant concerns in the areas tested.
The catch: the open weights are not out yet. Tencent says it plans to release them, plus a full system card, in the coming days — until then, nobody outside Tencent can download or run Hy4 itself. And the headline benchmark wins, including a financial-evaluation edge over DeepSeek's model, are Tencent's own internal tests, not independent results, so treat them as company claims for now.
Why It Matters
Hy4 lands in a crowded week for Chinese AI — and it shows where the race is heading: not just smarter chatbots, but agents that can see a screen and do the work on it. If the promised open weights arrive, Hy4 could become a serious open alternative for developers building computer-using agents. Until then, it is a strong hosted release with one big "coming soon" attached.
The verdict: a genuinely useful upgrade with real computer-use skills — but the open-source story is still a promise, not a download.
Comments
Post a Comment