Tencent's new AI can read images and run software on its own

Tencent has released Hy4, an AI model that can understand images and operate software on its own. It is the first Tencent model to do both. An early outside test rates it as solid but not at the top. It also shows a clear weak spot: without web search, it often invents answers instead of admitting it does not know.

What it does

Hy4 is built to pick out fine details in photos and complex diagrams. In one demo, it found a roughly two-meter component on a warehouse roof inside a huge aerial image. It can also control a computer. Tencent trained it on professional tools like Blender and CAD programs, and on jobs that need several apps used in a row.

Tencent also aimed it at office and finance work. The company says Hy4 can work with people in real time on Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. For game makers, it was adapted for the Unreal, Unity and Godot engines.

How good it is

Tencent says over 200 finance professionals judged Hy4 on nearly 600 real-world tasks. It ranked ahead of Chinese rivals Deepseek V4.1 Flash, Kimi K3.1 Pro and GLM-5.3 Flash. That is Tencent's own account.

An independent group, Artificial Analysis, scored it 35 points on its Intelligence Index. The median is 30. That ties Hy4 with Grok 4.7 and puts it second among Chinese labs, behind Kimi K3.1 Pro at 46. Tencent admits Hy4 still trails the best commercial models on advanced math, longer coding projects and complex image analysis.

The catch

On a factual accuracy test without web search, Hy4 answered about half the questions correctly from what it learned in training. When it did not know the answer, it made one up 89 percent of the time. Tencent says its revamped search feature cut errors in web research from nearly 16 percent to about 5 percent. That figure comes from internal tests.

Price and access

Tencent charges about $0.83 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens. Tokens are small chunks of text, roughly pieces of words. The price is the same as for the preview version.

Hy4 is available through Tencent Cloud, OpenRouter and Tencent apps such as the Yuanbao chatbot. Tencent plans to release the model's weights, the files that let others download and run it, but has not given a date. A faster, cheaper version called Hy4 flash is planned.

What happens next

A detailed safety report will arrive with the weights. China's commerce and science ministries also published a draft export control framework in October. It would cover weights for top-10 models, with a fast-track, automatic-approval process for open-source releases. How that affects Hy4 is not stated.