Wizardlm, a Beijing-based Microsoft AI Research Group, appears to have joined Tencent, a Chinese company that owns blockbuster games like WeChat and PUBG Mobile.
In a post on X on Tuesday, Can Xu, a senior AI researcher who led many projects within Wizardlm, said he and his team left Microsoft to join Hunyuan, one of Tencent’s AI development organizations. Over the past few months, Hunyuan has released AI models that include video and 3D object generators.
Wizardlm has already released models under the Hunyuan brand. In fact, Hunyuan-Turbos 0416. On XPost, Qingfeng Sun, who claims to be Wizardlm’s “co-founder,” says the Hunyuan-Turbos 0416 outperforms the “open” AI model, like Google’s Gemma 3 series.
It is not clear how many researchers are still part of Wizardlm, or when the team left Microsoft. We have reached out to both Tencent and Microsoft for comment.
Wizardlm, formed a few years ago, has a slightly strange history.
Last April, the team released the family Wizardlm-2 of AI models that they said were competitive with Openai’s GPT-4. However, just a day later, Microsoft pulled the Wizardlm-2 out of the web, saying the model had not undergone a “toxicity test.”
“Incorrectly missed an item needed during the model release process – Toxicity Test” was written in X’s post on April 16, 2024.
The deletion was a little too late. Users quickly recreated the original WizardLM-2 model and the customized, fine-tuned version.
Meanwhile, in a post that hugged the face of the AI Dev platform, Face CEO Clément Delangue said Microsoft’s move to wipe out other Wizardlm models has hurt the embraced face community by breaking many open source projects.
“The (Wizardlm) model was collectively downloaded over 100,000 times a month,” DeLangue wrote at the time. “We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are trying to get in touch with the author (and) Microsoft to find a solution that is appropriate for our community members.”
At Tencent, Wizardlm appears to be continuing to develop and release AI models to a greater or lesser extent. Tencent recently restructured its Hunyuan team, establishing two new units, increasing AI infrastructure spending.
Tencent is attributing the company’s AI investments to 8% year-on-year growth in the first quarter of 2025. Tencent plans to invest 90 billion yuan, or about $12.49 billion, into capital expenditures this year, many of which say it will encourage AI efforts.