Tencent hires WizardLM team, a Microsoft AI group with an odd history

CodeCanyon · May 13

WizardLM, a Beijing-based Microsoft AI research group, appears to have joined Tencent, the Chinese company that owns WeChat and blockbuster games like PUBG Mobile.

In a post on X on Tuesday, Can Xu, a senior AI researcher who led a number of projects within WizardLM, said that he and the team left Microsoft to join Hunyuan, one of Tencent’s AI development orgs. Over the past few months, Hunyuan has released AI models including video and 3D object generators.

WizardLM has already released a Hunyuan-branded model, in fact: Hunyuan-TurboS 0416. In an X post, Qingfeng Sun, who claims to be a “co-founder” of WizardLM, says that Hunyuan-TurboS 0416 outperforms “open” AI models like Google’s Gemma 3 series.

It’s not clear how many researchers are still a part of WizardLM or when the team might’ve left Microsoft. We’ve reached out to both Tencent and Microsoft for comment.

WizardLM, formed several years ago, has a bit of a strange history.

Last April, the team, then under Microsoft, released a family of AI models, WizardLM-2, that it said was competitive with OpenAI’s GPT-4. But after only a day, Microsoft pulled WizardLM-2 from the web, saying that the models hadn’t undergone “toxicity testing.”

“We accidentally missed an item required in the model release process — toxicity testing,” the WizardLM team wrote in a post on X on April 16, 2024. “We are currently completing this test quickly and then will re-release our model as soon as possible.”

Techcrunch event

Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI

Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking.

Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI

Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last.

Berkeley, CA | June 5

REGISTER NOW

The deletion came a little too late. Users quickly reuploaded the original WizardLM-2 models as well as customized, fine-tuned versions.

Meanwhile, in a post on the AI dev platform Hugging Face, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said that Microsoft’s move, which also wiped out other WizardLM models, harmed the Hugging Face community by breaking a number of open source projects.

“[The WizardLM] models were collectively downloaded over a hundred thousand times a month,” Delangue wrote at the time. “We apologize for the inconvenience & are trying to get in touch with the author [and] Microsoft in order to try to find a good resolution for community members.”

At Tencent, it seems WizardLM will keep doing what it was doing, more or less: developing and releasing AI models. Tencent recently restructured its Hunyuan team, establishing two new units and upping its AI infrastructure spending.

Tencent attributed its 8% year-over-year growth in Q1 2025 to the company’s AI investments. Tencent has said that it plans to put 90 billion yuan, or around $12.49 billion, toward capital expenditures this year, much of which will fuel its AI efforts.