Tencent releases Hy4 with vision and computer control

Overview

Updated 1 hour ago

Tencent released the full version of Hy4 on November 4, adding image understanding and the ability to operate software to its flagship model. The 770-billion-parameter system is sold through Tencent Cloud and OpenRouter, and runs inside Tencent's coding, office and chat products.

Tencent says Hy4 is the first of its models to rank among the strongest open-weight models, and it plans to publish the weights. That matters because a model that can read a chart and click through a spreadsheet moves agent-style automation from a demo to something small teams can try.

Why it matters

Charts and software control now cost $0.83 per million input tokens from a model Tencent plans to give away.

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Key Indicators

770B

Total parameters

Tencent's Hy3 line ran under 300 billion parameters; Hy4 more than doubles that.

$0.834

API price per million input tokens

Unchanged from the Hy4 preview, with cached input at $0.042.

$2.501

API price per million output tokens

Output costs roughly three times input.

5.45%

Hallucination rate on Tencent's internal test

Down from 15.76% on the preview, by Tencent's own measurement.

19.1%

Game development improvement over preview

Tencent's internal GameDev benchmark; game logic improved 9.8%.

70%

Finance evaluators with five or more years of experience

213 finance professionals scored Hy4 on 579 real-world tasks; 153 came from outside Tencent.

Voices

Curated perspectives — historical figures and your fellow readers.

Organizations Involved

Tencent

Technology company

Developer and distributor of Hy4

Shenzhen-based internet company that builds the Hunyuan model family and ships it through its own apps and cloud.

Tencent Hunyuan

AI research and product unit

Built and trained Hy4

Tencent's model team, which trains the Hy series and publishes its research notes.

OpenRouter

Model hosting marketplace

Third-party channel for Hy4 access

A marketplace that routes developer requests to many AI models behind one API.

Vercel AI Gateway

Developer infrastructure service

Lists Hy4 alongside other models

A routing layer that lets web developers swap AI models without rewriting their code.

Timeline

August 2026 November 2026

3 events Latest: Today

November 2026
Full Hy4 released with vision and computer use
Today Release

Tencent adds image understanding, command-line and graphical interface control, and long-horizon task training.
Today
Hy4 goes live on Tencent Cloud and OpenRouter
Today Distribution

Pricing held flat versus the preview at $0.834 input and $2.501 output per million tokens.
Today
August 2026
Hy4 preview ships with weights
Release

Tencent open-sourced a preview version and named over-reasoning and over-verification as known flaws.
August 2026

Scenarios

Tencent publishes Hy4 weights and system card

Likely Resolves by Q1 2027

Discussed by: Tencent's own release post, which says weights and a system card will follow

Tencent has said it will open-source the weights and pair them with a system card covering safety evaluations. The preview was open-sourced in August, and the company has lined up the vLLM and SGLang inference projects to support serving. A downloadable 770-billion-parameter model would let cloud providers and enterprises run Hy4 on their own hardware instead of paying per token. The open question is timing: Tencent has not given a date, and large models are often delayed while safety reviews finish.

Hy4 Flash launches at a lower price than Hy4

Likely Resolves by Q2 2027

Discussed by: Tencent's release post, which says a flash model is coming soon with better cost-efficiency

Tencent said it plans a Hy4 Flash variant with faster inference and lower cost. That would mirror the tiering most labs use: a large model for hard tasks, a cheap one for volume. If it ships, the practical effect is that high-volume work like document parsing and routine coding help gets cheaper, while Hy4 stays the option for long multi-step jobs.

Hy4 becomes a top-10 model by token volume on OpenRouter

Possible Resolves by Feb 28, 2027

Discussed by: Developer routing data published by OpenRouter

Hy4's availability on OpenRouter and Vercel's AI Gateway puts it in front of developers who never touch Tencent Cloud. Price is the lever: $0.834 per million input tokens is cheap for a model with vision. Whether usage follows depends on whether Hy4 holds up on coding and agent tasks against cheaper Chinese rivals and US mid-tier models.

Historical Context

3 moments from history that rhyme with this story — and how they unfolded.

July 2023

Meta releases Llama 2 weights (July 2023)

Meta published the weights for Llama 2 and allowed commercial use, a break from the narrower research licenses that had come before. Microsoft agreed to distribute it through Azure.

Then

Startups built products on Llama 2 immediately, and hosting services sprang up to run it.

Now

It set the template for open-weight releases that Chinese labs later followed and, in several cases, outran.

Why this matters now

Hy4 follows the same playbook: publish weights, line up inference tools, and let outside companies distribute it.

December 2024

DeepSeek-V3 ships (December 2024)

DeepSeek released a mixture-of-experts model with 671 billion total parameters but only 37 billion active per token, which kept serving costs low. It matched or beat larger US models on several coding and math tests.

Then

It became the default cheap model for developers experimenting with open weights.

Now

Chinese labs began competing openly on price-per-token rather than only on benchmark scores.

Why this matters now

Hy4's architecture and $0.834 input price put it in the same contest: large total parameters, small active slice, aggressive pricing.

January 2025

DeepSeek-R1 release (January 2025)

DeepSeek published an open reasoning model and its app topped download charts. Investors read it as evidence that Chinese labs could match US frontier work at far lower cost, and AI chip stocks fell sharply.

Then

US labs publicly disputed the cost claims and accelerated their own release schedules.

Now

Open-weight Chinese models became a permanent part of the global market rather than a curiosity.

Why this matters now

Tencent's claim to be in the top tier of open models is the next step in that arc, now with vision and software control attached.