Tencent launches T1 reasoning model amid growing AI competition in China
The launch comes amid heightened rivalry in China's AI landscape following DeepSeek's emergence.
SHANGHAI: Chinese tech giant Tencent on Friday (Mar 21) night launched the official version of its T1 reasoning model, stepping up competition in China's increasingly crowded artificial intelligence (AI) sector.
The upgraded T1 model offers faster response times and enhanced capabilities for processing extended text documents, the company said in a post on its official WeChat account.
T1 can "keep the content logic clear and the text neat and clean", the post said, while the hallucination rate is "extremely low".
The launch comes amid heightened rivalry in China's AI landscape following DeepSeek's introduction of models that offer comparable or superior performance to Western systems at substantially lower costs.
Tencent had previously released a preview version of T1 through platforms, including its AI assistant application Yuanbao.
The official version will be powered by Tencent's Turbo S foundational language model, unveiled late last month, which the company claims processes queries faster than rival DeepSeek's R1 model.
A chart published in the post comparing the T1 model to DeepSeek R1 showed Tencent's outperformed on some knowledge and reasoning benchmarks.
Tencent has ramped up its AI investments in recent months. On Thursday, the company announced plans to increase capital expenditure in 2025, following already aggressive AI spending throughout 2024.
BEIJING BOOSTSÂ AI STARTUP MANUS
Also on the Chinese AI front, homegrown startup Manus on Thursday registered its China-facing AI assistant and was featured for the first time in a state media broadcast, highlighting Beijing's strategy of boosting domestic AI firms that have received overseas recognition.
Since China's DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley by releasing AI models comparable to its US competitors but developed at a fraction of the cost, Chinese investors have been on the lookout for the next domestic startup with the potential to upend the global tech order.
Some have pointed to Manus. The company went viral on X a few weeks ago by releasing what it claimed to be the world's first general AI agent, capable of making decisions and executing tasks autonomously, with much less prompting required compared to AI chatbots like ChatGPT and DeepSeek.
Beijing is now showing signs that it will support Manus' rollout within China, echoing its response to DeepSeek's success.
State broadcaster CCTV on Thursday devoted television coverage to Manus for the first time, publishing a video on the difference between its AI agent and DeepSeek's AI chatbot.
On the same day, Beijing's municipal government announced that a Chinese version of an earlier Manus product, an AI assistant called Monica, had completed the registration required for generative AI apps in China, clearing an important regulatory hurdle.
Chinese regulators require all generative AI applications released in the country to abide by strict rules, partly designed to ensure these products do not generate content considered sensitive or damaging by Beijing.
Last week, Manus announced a strategic partnership with the team behind tech giant Alibaba's Qwen AI models.
The move could bolster the domestic rollout of Manus' AI agent, which is currently only available to users with invite codes and has a waiting list of 2 million, according to the startup.
