Tencent launches Hunyuan T1 AI model to compete with DeepSeek’s R1

Tencent Holdings has introduced its Hunyuan T1 AI reasoning model that matches DeepSeek’s R1 in both performance and pricing. According to Coco Feng of the South China Morning Post, the model scored 87.2 points on the MMLU Pro benchmark, surpassing DeepSeek-R1’s 84 points but falling short of OpenAI’s o1 at 89.3 points. Pricing is competitive at 1 yuan per million input tokens and 4 yuan per million output tokens. Tencent claims to be the first to implement a hybrid architecture combining Google’s Transformer and Mamba technologies, which reportedly reduces training costs and increases decoding speed by 200%. The company is pursuing a “double-core” AI strategy, offering both its own Hunyuan models and integrating DeepSeek-R1 into its platforms as it positions AI as a core revenue stream.