Wizardlm, a Microsoft research group with headquarters in Beijing, seems to have joined Tencent, the Chinese club that owns WeChat and Blockbuster games as a mobile Pubg.
In one post on Tuesday, Can Xu, a senior artificial intelligence researcher who led a series of projects within Wizardlm, said that he and the team left Microsoft to join Hunyuan, one of the development organs of Tencent. In recent months, Hunyuan has released models to including video and 3d objects.
Wizardlm has already released a Hunyuan brand model, in fact: Hunyuan-Turbos 0416. In a post X, Qingfeng Sun, who claims to be a “co-founder” of Wizardlm, says that Hunyuan-Turbon 0416 exceeds the “open” models such as the Google Gema 3 series.
It is not clear how many researchers are still part of Wizardlm or when the team could have left Microsoft. We contacted Tencent and Microsoft for a comment.
Wizardlm, formed several years ago, has a little strange story.
Last April, the team, then under Microsoft, released a family of Ai models, Wizardlm-2, who said it was competitive with Openii GPT-4. But after only one day, Microsoft extracted Wizardlm-2 from the web, saying that the models had not undergone “toxicity test”.
“We accidentally lost an article requested in the process of issuing the model: toxicity test,” wrote the Wizardlm team in a post on x on April 16, 2024. “Currently we are completing this test quickly and therefore we release our model as soon as possible.”
The cancellation came a little too late. Users quickly recharged the original Wizardlm-2 models and personalized and perfected versions.
In the meantime, in a post on the AI dev platform that embraces the face, embracing the CEO of Face Clément Delague said that Microsoft’s move, which also swept away other Wizardlm models, damaged the community of the embraced face by breaking a series of open source projects.
“(The Wizardlm models) have been collectively downloaded more than one hundred thousand times a month,” wrote Delague at the moment. “We apologize for the inconvenience and are trying to get in touch with the author (e) Microsoft to try to find a good resolution for the members of the community.”
In Tencent, it seems that Wizardlm will continue to do what he was doing, more or less: to develop and release AI models. Tencent recently renovated his Hunyuan team, establishing two new units and increasing the expenditure for artificial intelligence infrastructures.
Tencent has attributed its growth of 8% on an annual basis in the first quarter of 2025 to the investments AI of the company. Tencent has said that it plans to put 90 billion of yuan, or about $ 12.49 billion, towards capital expenses this year, many of which will feed its efforts of artificial intelligence.
